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BITS OF TALK 
ABOUT HOME MATTERS 



I 



aSs tje Same ^utjor* 
ZEPH : A Posthumous Story. 

i6mo. Cloth. Prices ^1.25. 

♦ 

LITTLE, BROWN, & CO., BOSTON. 



Bits of Talk 



ABOUT HOME MATTERS. 



Bv H. H., 

AUTHOR OF ** VERSKS " AND " BITS OF TRAVEL.'^ 




BOSTON: 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, 

1899. 



<-! 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

MAR. 2 1901 

Copyright entry 

CLASS Cly XXc. No. 

COPY B. 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, b]p 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, 
In the Oflfice of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington^ 



University Press: John Wilson & Son, 
Cambridge. 



r^^^- 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

The Inhumanities of Parents — Corporal Punish- 
ment • ••••••••••••• 9 

The Inhumanities of Parents — Needless Denials 17 

The Inhumanities of Parents — Rudeness ... 28 

Breaking the Will •.-,.. 39 

The Reign of Archelaus ..••.•••• 50 

The Awkward Age 59 

A Day with a Courteous Mother •••••• 65 

Children in Nova Scotia 71 

The Republic of the Family 76 

The Ready- to-Halts . • . . 83 

The Descendants of Nabal . 87 

** Boys not allowed " 94 

Half an Hour in a Railway Station • • • • • 100 

A Genius for Affection 106 

Rainy Days • in 

Friends of the Prisoners ••••••••• 117 

A Companion for the Winter . 122 

Choice of Colors ••••• 128 

The Apostle of Beauty • • . 132 



vili CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

English Lodging-Houses • • . 138 

Wet the Clay 144 

The King's Friend ••••••••••. 149 

Learning to speak .•• 152 

Private Tyrants 156 

Margin • •• 162 

The Fine Art of Smiling 165 

Death-bed Repentance 170 

The Correlation of Moral Forces 175 

A Simple Bill of Fare for a Christmas Dinner . 179 

Children's Parties 184 

After-supper Talk . • 189 

Hysteria in Literature • • • • • 193 

Jog Trot 199 

The Joyless American . . 203 

Spiritual Teething • • • • 207 

Glass Houses . • • • 212 

The Old-Clothes Monger in Journalism • • • • 217 

The Country Landlord's Side ••••••• 220 

The Good Staflf of Pleasure 227 

Wanted — a Home • • • • 333 



BITS OF TALK. 



THE INHUMANITIES OF PARENTS. 

CORPORAL PUNISHMENT. 

TVrOT long ago a Presbyterian minister in Western 
-*-^ New York whipped his three-year-old boy to 
death, for refusing to say his prayers. The little fin- 
gers were broken ; the tender flesh was bruised and 
actually mangled ; strong men wept when they looked 
on the body ; and the reverend murderer, after having 
been set free on bail, was glad to return and take 
refuge within the walls of his prison, to escape sum- 
mary punishment at the hands of an outraged com- 
munity. At the bare mention of such cruelty, every 
heart grew sick and faint ; men and women were dumb 
with horror : only tears and a hot demand for instant 
retaliation availed. 

The question whether, after all, that baby martyr 
were not fortunate among his fellows, would, no doubt, 
be met by resentful astonishment. But it is a question 
which may well be asked, may well be pondered. 
Heart-rending as it is to think for an instant of the 
agonies which the poor child must have borne for some 



lO BITS OF TALK. 

hours after his infant brain was too bewildered by ter- 
ror and pain to understand what was required oi him, 
it still cannot fail to occur to deeper reflection that the 
torture was short and small in comparison with what 
the next ten years might have held for him if he had 
lived. To earn entrance on the spiritual life by the 
briefest possible experience of the physical, is always 
" greater gain ; " but how emphatically is it so when 
the conditions of life upon earth are sure to be unfa- 
vorable ! 

If it were possible in any way to get a statistical 
summing-up and a tangible presentation of the amount 
of physical pain inflicted by parents on children under 
twelve years of age, the most callous-hearted would be 
surprised and shocked. If it were possible to add to 
this estimate an accurate and scientific demonstration 
of the extent to which such pain, by weakening the 
nervous system and exhausting its capacity to resist 
disease, diminishes children's chances for life, the 
world would stand aghast 

Too little has been said upon this point. The oppo- 
nents of corporal punishment usually approach the 
subject either from the sentimental or the moral stand- 
point. The argument on either of these grounds can 
be made strong enough, one would suppose, to paralyze 
every hand lifted to strike a child. But the question 
of the direct and lasting physical effect of blows — even 
of one blow on the delicate tissues of a child's body, 
on the frail and trembling nerves, on the sensUive 
organization which is trying, under a thousand unfa- 



TEE INHUMANITIES OF PARENTS, n 

voring conditions, to adjust itself to the hard work ol 
both h'ving and growing — has yet to be properly 
considered. 

Every one knows the sudden sense of insupportable 
pain, sometimes producing even dizziness and nausea, 
which follows the accidental hitting of the ankle or 
elbow against a hard substance. It does not need that 
the blow be very hard to bring involuntary tears to 
adult eyes. But what is such a pain as this, in com- 
parison with the pain of a dozen or more quick tin- 
gling blows from a heavy hand on flesh which is, which 
must be as much more sensitive than ours, as are the 
souls which dwell in it purer than ours. Add to this 
physical pain the overwhelming terror which only utter 
helplessness can feel, and which is the most recognizable 
quahty in the cry of a very young child under whipping ; 
add the instinctive sense of disgrace, of outrage, which 
often keeps the older child stubborn and still through- 
out, — and you have an amount and an intensity of suf- 
fering from which even tried nerves might shrink. Again, 
who does not know — at least, what woman does not 
know — that violent weeping, for even a very short 
time, is quite enough to cause a feeling of languor and 
depression, of nervous exhaustion for a whole day? 
Yet it does not seem to occur to mothers that little 
children must feel this, in proportion to the length of 
time and violence of their crying, far more than grown 
people. Who has not often seen a poor child re- 
ceive, within an hour or two of the first whipping, a 
second one, for some small ebullition of nervous vn i ■ 



12 BITS OF TALK. 

tability, which was simply inevitable from its spent 
and worn condition? 

It is safe to say that in families where whipping is 
regularly recognized as a punishment, few children 
under ten years of age, and of average behavior, have 
less than one whipping a week. Sometimes they have 
more, sometimes the whipping is very severe. Thus 
you have in one short year sixty or seventy occasions 
on w^hich for a greater or less time, say from one to 
three hours, the child's nervous system is subjected to a 
tremendous strain from the effect of terror and physical 
pain combined with long crying. Will any physician 
tell us that this fact is not an element in that child's 
physical condition at the end of that year ? Will any 
physician dare to say that there may not be, in that 
child's life, crises when the issues of life and death will 
be so equally balanced that the tenth part of the ner- 
vous force lost in such fits of crying, and in the endur- 
ance of such pain, could turn the scale 1 

Nature's retributions, like her rewards, are cumula- 
tive. Because her sentences against evil works are 
not executed speedily, therefore the hearts of the sons 
of men are fully set in them to do evil. But the sen- 
tence always is executed, sooner or later, and that 
inexorably. Your son, O unthinking mother ! may fall 
by the way in the full prime of his manhood, for lack 
of that strength which his infancy spent in enduring 
your hasty and severe punishments. 

It is easy to say, — and universally is said, — by 
people who cling to the old and fight against the new 



THE INHUMANITIES OF PARENTS. 13 

•*A11 this outcry about corporal punishment is sen- 
timental nonsense. The world is full of men and 
women, who have grown up strong and good, in spite 
of whippings ; and as for me, I know I never had any 
more whipping than I deserved, or than was good for 
me." 

Are you then so strong and clear and pure in your 
physical and spiritual nature and life, that you are sure 
no different training could have made either your body 
or your soul better ? Are these men and women, of 
whom the world is full, so able-bodied, whole-souled, 
strong-minded, that you think it needless to look about 
for any method of making the next generation better ? 
Above all, do you believe that it is a part of the legiti- 
mate outworking of God's plan and intent in creating 
human beings to have more than one-half of thern die 
in childhood ? If we are not to believe that this fearful 
mortality is a part of God's plan, is it wise to refuse to 
consider all possibilities, even those seemingly most 
remote, of diminishing it ? 

No argument is so hard to meet (simply because it 
is not an argument) as the assumption of the good and 
propriety of " the thing that hath been." It is one of 
the deviPs best sophistries, by which he keeps good 
people undisturbed in doing the things he likes. It 
has been in all ages the bulwark behmd which evils 
have made stand, and have slain their thousands. It 
is the last enemy which shall be destroyed. It is the 
only real support of the cruel evil of corporal punish- 
ment 



14 BITS OF TALK. 

Suppose that such punishment of children had been 
unheard of till now. Suppose that the idea had yester- 
day been suggested for the first time that by inflicting 
physical pain on a child's body you might make him 
recollect certain truths ; and suppose that instead of 
whipping, a very moderate and harmless degree of 
pricking with pins or cutting with knives or burning 
with fire had been suggested. Would not fathers and 
mothers have cried out all over the land at the inhu- 
manity of the idea ? 

Would they not still cry out at the inhumanity of 
one who, as things are to-day, should propose the sub- 
stitution of pricking or cutting or burning for whip- 
ping ? But I think it would not be easy to show in 
what wise small pricks or cuts are more inhuman than 
blows ; or why lying may not be as legitimately cured 
by blisters made with a hot coal as by black and blue 
spots made with a ruler. The principle is the same ; 
and if the principle be right, why not multiply methods ? 

It seems as if this one suggestion, candidly con- 
sidered, might be enough to open all parents' eyes to 
the enormity of whipping. How many a loving mother 
will, without any thought of cruelty, inflict half-a-dozen 
quick blows on the little hand of her child, when she 
could no more take a pin and make the same number 
of thrusts into the tender flesh, than she could bind 
the baby on a rack. Yet the pin-thrusts would hurt 
far less, and would probably make a deeper impres- 
sion on the child's mind. 

Among tb5 more ignorant classes, the frequency and 



TEE INHUMANITIES OF PARENTS, 15 

severity of corporal punishment of children, are appal- 
ling. The facts only need to be held up closely and 
persistently before the community to be recognized as 
horrors of cruelty far greater than some which have 
been made subjects of legislation. 

It was my misfortune once to be forced to spend 
several of the hottest weeks of a hot summer in New 
York. In near neighborhood to my rooms w^ere 
blocks of buildings which had shops on the first 
floor and tenements above. In these lived the fami- 
lies of small tradesmen, and mechanics of the better 
sort. During those scorching nights every window 
was thrown open, and all sounds were borne with dis- 
tinctness through the hot still air. Chief among them 
were the shrieks and cries of little children, and blows 
and angry words from tired, overworked mothers. At 
times it became almost unbearable: it was hard to 
refrain from an attempt at rescue. Ten, twelve, twenty 
quick, hard blows, whose sound rang out plainly, I 
counted again and again ; mingling with them came 
the convulsive screams of the poor children, and that 
most piteous thing of all, the reiteration of " Oh, 
mamma ! oh, mamma ! " as if, through all, the helpless 
little creatures had an instinct that this word ought to 
be in itself the strongest appeal. These families were 
all of the better class of work people, comfortable and 
respectable. What sounds were to be heard in the 
more wretched haunts of the city, during those nights, 
the heart struggled away from fancying. But the 
shrieks of those children will never wholly die out of 



1 6 BITS OF TALK. 

the air. I hear them to-day ; and mingling with them, 
the question rings perpetually in my ears, " Why does 
not the law protect children, before the point at which 
life is endangered ? " 

A cartman may be arrested in the streets for the 
brutal beating of a horse which is his own, and which 
he has the right to kill if he so choose. Should not a 
man be equally withheld from the brutal beating of 
a child who is not his own, but God's, and whom to 
kill is murder? 



THE INHUMANITIES OF PARENTS, i*i 



THE INHUMANITIES OF PARENTS. 

NEEDLESS DENIALS. 

VT TEBSTER'S Dictionary, which cannot be accused 
^ ^ of any leaning toward sentimentalism, defines 
'< inhumanity " as " cruelty in action ; " and " cruelty " 
as " any act of a human being which inflicts unneces- 
sary pain." The word inhumanity has an ugly sound, 
and many inhuman people are utterly and honestly 
unconscious of their own inhumanities ; it is necessary 
therefore to entrench one's self behind some such bul- 
wark as the above definitions afford, before venturing 
the accusation that fathers and mothers are habitually 
guilty of inhuman conduct in inflicting " unnecessary 
pain " on their children, by needless denials of their 
innocent wishes and impulses. 

Most men and a great many women would be aston- 
ished at being told that simple humanity requires them 
to gratify every wish, even the smallest, of their chil- 
Iren, when the pain of having that wish denied is not 
made necessary, either for the child's own welfare^ 
physical or mental, or by circumstances beyond the 
parent's control. The word " necessary " is a very au- 
thoritative one ; conscience, if left free, soon narrows 
2 



1 8 BITS OF TALK. 

down its boundaries ; inconvenience, hindiance, depri- 
vation, self-denial, one or all, or even a great deal ot 
all, to ourselves, cannot give us a shadow of right to say 
that the pain of the child's disappointment is "neces- 
sary." Selfishness grasps at help from the hackneyed 
sayings, that it is " best for children to bear the yoko 
in their youth ; " ** the sooner they learn that they can- 
not have their own way the better ; " " it is a good dis- 
cipline for them to practise self-denial," &c. But the 
yoke that they must bear, in spite of our lightening it 
all we can, is heavy enough ; the instances in which 
it is, for good and sufficient reasons, impossible for 
them to have their own way are quite numerous enough 
to insure their learning the lesson very early ; and as 
for the discipline of self-denial, — God bless their dear, 
patient souls ! — if men and women brought to bear on 
the thwartings and vexations of their daily lives, and 
their relations with each other, one hundredth part of 
the sweet acquiescence and brave endurance which 
average children show, under the average management 
of average parents, this world would be a much pleas- 
anter place to live in than it is. 

Let any conscientious and tender mother, who per- 
haps reads these words with tears half of resentment, 
half of grief in her eyes, keep for three days an exact 
record of the little requests which she refuses, from the 
baby of five, who begged to stand on a chair and look 
out of the window, and was hastily told, " No, it would 
hurt the chair," when one minute would have been 
enough time to lay a folded newspaper over the up- 




THE INHUMANITIES 01 PARENTS, 



holstery, and another minute enough to explain to 
him, with a kiss and a hug, " that that was to save his 

spoiling mamma-s nice chair with his boots ; " and the 
tvs*o minutes together would probably have made «ure 
that another time the dear little fellow would look out 
for a paper himself, when he wished to climb up to 
the window, — from this baby up to the pretty girl of 
twelve, who, v;ith as distinct a perception of the becom- 
ing as her mother had before her, went to school im- 
happy because she was compelled to wear the blue neck- 
tie instead of the scarlet one, and surely for no especial 
reason ! At the end of the three days, an honest exam- 
ination of the record would show that full half of these 
small denials, all of which had involved pain, and some 
of which had brought contest and punishment, had been 
needless, had been hastily made, and made usually od 
accoimt of the slight interruption or inconvenience 
which would result from yielding to the request I 
am very much mistaken if the honest keeping and 
honest study of such a three days' record would not 
wholly change the atmosphere in many a house to what 
it ought to be, and bring almost constant sunshine and 
bhss where now, too often, are storm and misery. 

With some parents, although they are neither harsn 
nor hard in manner, nor yet unloving in nature, the habit- 
ual first impulse seems to be to refuse : they appear to 
have a singular obtuseness to the fact that it is, or can 
be, of any consequence to a child whether it does or 
does not do the thing it desires. Often the refusal is 
withdrawn on the first symptom of grief or disappoint- 



20 BITS OF TALK. 

ment on the child's pari ; a thing which is fatal to all 
real control of a child, and almost as unkind as the 
tirst unnecessary denial, — perhaps even more so, as it 
involves double and treble pains, in future instances, 
where there cannot and must not be any giving way 
to entreaties. It is doubtless this lack of perception, 
— akin, one would think, to color-blindness, — which 
is at the bottom of this great and common inhumanity 
among kind and intelhgent fathers and mothers : an 
inhumanity so common that it may almost be said to 
be universal ; so common that, while we are obliged to 
look on and see our dearest friends guilty of it, we find 
it next to impossible to make them understand what 
we mean when we make outcry over some of its glar- 
ing instances. 

You, my dearest of friends, — or, rather, you who 
would be, but for this one point of hopeless contention 
between us, — do you remember a certain warm morn- 
ing, last August, of which I told you then you had 
not heard the last 1 Here it is again : perhaps in print 
I can make it look blacker to you than I could then ; 
part of it I saw, part of it you unwillingly confessed 
to me, and part of it little Blue Eyes told me her- 
self. 

It was one of those ineffable mornings, when a thrill 
of delight and expectancy fills the air ; one felt that 
every appointment of the day must be unlike those of 
other days, — must be festive, must help on the "white 
day " for which all things looked ready. I remembei 
how like the morning itself you looked as you stood io 



THE INHUMANITIES OF PARENTS. 21 

the doorway, in a fresh white muslin dress, with laven- 
der ribbons. I said, " Oh, extravagance ! For break- 
fast ! " 

" I know," you said ; " but the day was so enchant- 
ing, I could not make up my mind to wear any thing 
that had been worn before." Here an uproar from the 
nursery broke out, and we both ran to the spot There 
stood little Blue Eyes, in a storm of temper, with one 
small foot on a crumpled mass of pink cambric on the 
floor ; and nurse, who was also very red and angry, 
explained that Miss would not have on her pink frock 
because it was not quite clean. " It is all dirty, mam- 
ma, and I don't want to put it on ! You've got on a 
nice white dress : why can't I ? " 

You are in the main a kind mother, and you do not 
like to give little Blue Eyes pain ; so you knelt down 
beside her, and told her that she must be a good girl, 
and have on the gown Mary had said, but that she 
should have on a pretty white apron, which would hide 
the spots. And Blue Eyes, being only six years old, 
and of a loving, generous nature, dried her tears, ac- 
cepted the very questionable expedient, tried to forget 
the spots, and in a few moments came out on the.piazza, 
chirping like a little bird. By this time the rare quality 
of the morning had stolen like wine into our brains, 
and you exclaimed, " We will have breakfast out here, 
under the vines ! How George will like it ! " And in 
another instant you were flitting back and forth, help- 
ing the rather ungracious Bridget move out the break- 
tast-table, with its tempting array. 



«2 BITS OF TALK 

** Oh, mamma, mamma,'* cried Blue Eyes, " can't I 
have my little tea-set on a little table beside your big 
table ? Oh, let me, let me ! " and she fairly quivered 
with excitement. You hesitated. How I watched you ! 
But it was a little late. Bridget was already rather 
cross ; the tea-set was packed in a box, and up on a 
high shelf. 

" No, dear. There is not time, and we must not 
make Bridget any more trouble ; but " — seeing the 
tears coming again — *'you shall have some real tea in 
papa's big gilt cup, and another time you shall have your 
tea-set when we have breakfast out here again." As 
I said before, you are a kind mother, and you made the 
denial as easy to be borne as you could, and Blue Eyes 
was again pacified, not satisfied, only bravely m.aking 
the best of it. And so we had our breakfast ; a break- 
fast to be remembered, too. But as for the "other 
time " which you had promised to Blue Eyes ; how 
well I knew that not many times a year did such morn- 
ings and breakfasts come, and that it was well she 
would forget all about it ! After breakfast, — you re- 
member how we lingered, — George suddenly started 
up, saying, " How hard it is to go to town ! I say, 
girls, walk down to the station with me, both of 
you." 

" And me too, me too, papa ! " said Blue Eyes. You 
did not hear her ; but I did, and she had flown for her 
hat. At the door we found her, saying again, " Me 
too, mamma ! " Then you remembered her boots : 
*^ Oh, my darling," you said, kisdng her, for you are a 



THE IjS HUMANITIES OF PARENTS. 2j 

kind motner, " you cannot go in those nice boots : the 
dew will spoil them ; and it is not worth while to change 
them, we shall be back in a few minutes.'' 

A storm of tears would have burst out in an instant 
at this the third disappointment, if I had not sat down 
on the door-step, and, taking her in my lap, whispered 
that auntie was going to stay too. 

"Oh, put the child down, and come along," called 
the great, strong, uncomprehending man — Blue Eyes' 
dear papa. " Pussy won't mind. Be a good girl, 
pussy ; ril bring you a red balloon to-night." 

You are both very kind, you and George, and you 
both love little Blue Eyes dearly. 

" No, I won't come. I believe my boots are too 
thin," said I ; and for the equivocation there was in 
my reply I am sure of being forgiven. You both 
turned back twice to look at the child, and kissed your 
hands to her ; and I wondered if you did not see in her 
face, what I did, real grief and patient endurance. Even 
" The King of the Golden River " did not rouse her : 
she did not want a story ; she did not want me ; she 
did not want a "ed balloon at night ; she wanted to 
walk between ^ou, to the station, with her little hands 
in yours ! God grant the day may not come when you 
will be heart-broken because you can never lead her 
any more ! 

She asked me some questions, while you were gone, 
which you remember I repeated to you. She asked 
me if I did not hate nice new shoes ; and why little 
girls could not put on. the dresses they liked best; and 



24 BITS OF TALK. 

if mamma did not look beautiful in that pretty white 
dress ; and said that, if she could only have had her 
own tea-set, at breakfast, she would have let me have 
my coffee in one of her cups. Gradually she grew 
happier, and began to tell me about her great wax-doll, 
which had eyes that could shut ; which was kept in a 
trunk because she was too little, mamma said, to play 
very much with it now ; but she guessed mamma would 
let her have it to-day ; did I not think so ? Alas ! I 
did, and I said so ; in fact, I felt sure that it was the 
very thing you would be certain to do, to sweeten the 
day, which had begun so sadly for poor little Blue 
Eyes. 

It seemed very long to her before you came back, 
and she was on the point of asking for her dolly as 
soon as you appeared ; but I whispered to her to wait 
till you were rested. After a few minutes I took her 
up to your room, — that lovely room with the bay win- 
dow to the east ; there you sat, in your white dress, sur- 
rounded with gay worsteds, all looking like a carnival 
of humming-birds. " Oh, how beautiful ! " I exclaimed, 
in involuntary admiration ; " what are you doing ? " 
You said that you were going to make an affghan, and 
that the morning was so enchanting you could not bear 
the thought of touching your mending, but were going 
to luxuriate in the worsteds. Some time passed in 
sorting the colors, and deciding on the contrasts, and 
I forgot all about the doll. Not so little Blue Eyes. 
I lemembered afterward how patiently she stood still, 
waiting and waiting for a gcip between our words, that 



THE INHUMANITIES OF PARENTS. 25 

she need not break the law against interrupting, with 
her eager — 

" Please, mamma, let me have my wax dolly to play 
with this morning ! I'll sit right here on the floor, by 
you and auntie, and not hurt her one bit. Oh, please 
do, mamma ! " 

You mean always to be a very kind mother, and you 
spoke as gently and lovingly as it is possible to speak 
when you replied : — 

" Oh, Pussy, mamma is too busy to get it ; she can't 
get up now. You can play with your blocks, and with 
your other dollies, just as well; that's a good little 
girl." 

Probably, if Blue Eyes had gone on imploring, you 
would have laid your worsteds down, and given her the 
dolly ; for you love her dearly, and never mean to make 
her unhappy. But neither you nor I were prepared 
for what followed. 

" You're a naughty, ugly, hateful mamma ! You 
never let me do any thing, and I wish you were dead ! " 
with such a burst of screaming and tears that we were 
both frightened. You looked, as well you might, heart- 
broken at such words from your only child. Vou took 
her away ; and when you came back, you cried, and 
said you had whipped her severely, and you did not 
know what you should do with a child of such a fright- 
ful temper. 

" Such an outburst as that, just because I told her, 
m the gentlest way possible, that she could not have a 
plaything ! It is terrible ! " 



Z(> BITS OF TALK. 

Then I said some words to you, which you though* 
were unjust. I asked you in what condition your own 
nerves would have been by ten o'clock that morning 
if your husband (who had, in one view, a much better 
right to thwart your harmless desires than you had to 
thwart your child's, since you, in the full understand- 
ing of maturity, gave yourself into his hands) had, In- 
stead of admiring your pretty white dress, told you to 
be more prudent, and not put it on ; had told you it 
would be nonsense to have breakfast out on the piazza ; 
and that he could not wait for you to walk to the sta- 
tion with him. You said that the cases were not at 
all parallel ; and I replied hotly that that was very 
true, for those matters would have been to you only 
the comparative trifles of one short day, and would 
have made you only a little cross and uncomfortable ; 
whereas to little Blue Eyes they were the all-absorb- 
ing desires of the hour, which, to a child in trouble, 
always looks as if it could never come to an end, and 
would never be followed by any thing better. 

Blue Eyes cried herself to sleep, and slept heavily 
till late in the afternoon. When her father came home, 
you said that she must not have the red balloon, be- 
cause she had been such a naughty girl. I have won- 
dered many times since why she did not cry again, or 
look grieved when you said that, and laid the balloon 
away. After eleven o'clock at night, I went to look at 
her, and found her sobbing in her sleep, and tossing 
about. I groaned as I thought, "This is only one 
day, and there are three hundred and sixty-five in a 



THE INHUMANITIES OF PARENTS, 27 

year ! " But I never recall the distorted face of that 
poor child, as, in her fearful passion, she told you she 
wished you were dead, without also remembering that 
even the gentle Christ said of him who should offend 
one of these little ones, "It were better for him that 3i 
mili-stone were hanged about his neck, and he wer? 
drowned in the depths of the sea ! " 



28 BITS OF TALK, 



THE INHUMANITIES OF PARENTS. 

RUDENESS. 

• Inhumanity — Cruelty. Cruelly — The disposition to gire unnece^ 
Bary pain," — Webster's Diet, 

T HAD intended to put third on the list of inhumani- 
•*" ties of parents " needless requisitions ; " but my 
last summer's observations changed my estimate, and 
convinced me that children suffer more pain from the 
rudeness with which they are treated than from being 
forced to do needless things which they dislike. In- 
deed, a positively and graciously courteous manner 
toward children is a thing so rarely seen in average 
daily life, the rudenesses which they receive are so innu- 
mtrable, that it is hard to tell where to begin in set- 
ting forth the evil. Children themselves often bring 
their sharp and unexpected logic to bear on some in- 
cident illustrating the difference in this matter of 
behavior between what is required from them and what 
is shown to them : as did a little boy 1 knew, whose 
father said crossly to him one morning, as he came 
into the breakfast-room, " Will you ever learn to shut 
that door after you ? " and a few seconds later, as 
the child was rather sulkily sitting down in his chair 



THE INHUMANITIES OF PARENTS, 2y 

''And do you mean to bid anybody * good-morning, 
or not ? " " I don't think you gave 7ne a very nice 
'good- morning,' anyhow," replied satirical justice, 
aged seven. Then, of course, he was reproved for 
speaking disrespectfully ; and so in the space of three 
minutes the beautiful opening of the new day, for both 
parents and children, was jarred and robbed of its 
fresh harmony by the father's thoughtless rudeness. 

Was the breakfast-room door much more likely to 
be shut the next morning ? No. The lesson was 
pushed aside by the pain, the motive to resolve was 
dulled by the antagonism. If that father had called 
his son, and, putting his arm round him, (oh ! the 
blessed and magic virtue of putting your arm round a 
child's neck ! ) had said, " Good-morning, my little 
man ; " and then, in a confidential whisper in his ear, 
" What shall we do to m.ake this forgetful Httle boy 
remember not to leave that door open, through which 
the cold wind blows in on all of us } " — can any words 
measure the difference between the first treatment and 
the second } between the success of the one and the 
failure of the other 1 

Scores of times in a day, a child is told, in a short, 
authoritative way, to do or not to do certain little things 
which we ask at the hands of older people, as favors, gra- 
ciously, and with deference to their choice. " Would 
you be so very kind as to close that window 1 " " May 
I trouble you for that cricket ? " "If you would be as 
comfortable in this chair as in that, I would like to 
change places with you." " Oh, excuse me, but yoiir 



?0 BITS OF TALK. 

head is between me and the light : could you see as 
well if you moved a little ? " " Would it hinder you 
too long to stop at the store for me ? I would be very 
much obliged to you, if you would." " Pray, do not 
let me crowd you," &c. In most people's speech to 
children, we find, as synonyms for these polite phrases : 
" Shut that window down, this minute." " Bring me 
that cricket." " I want that chair ; get up. You can 
sit in this." ^' Don't you see that you are right in my 
light ? Move along." " I want you to leave off play- 
ing, and go right down to the store for me." " Don't 
crowd so. Can't you see that there is not room enough 
for two people here ? " and so on. As I write, I feel 
an instinctive consciousness that these sentences will 
come like home-thrusts to some surprised people. I 
hope so. That is what I want. I am sure that in 
more than half the cases where family life is marred 
in peace, and almost stripped of beauty, by just these 
little rudenesses, the parents are utterly unconscious 
of them. The truth is, it has become like an estab- 
lished custom, this different and less courteous way 
of speaking to children on small occasions and minor 
matters. People who are generally civil and of fair 
kindliness do it habitually, not only to their own chil- 
dren, but to all children. We see it in the cars, in the 
stages, in stores, in Sunday schools, everywhere. 

On the other hand, let a child ask for any thing with- 
out saying "please," receive any thing without saying 
*Uhank you," sit still in the most comfortable seat 
without offering to give it up, or press its own prefer- 



TEE INHUMANITIES OF PARENTS, 31 

ence for a particular book, chair, or apple, to the in- 
conveniencing of an elder, and what an outcry we 
have : " Such rudeness ! " " Such an ill-mannered 
child ! " " His parents must have neglected him 
strangely." Not at all : they have been steadily tell- 
ing him a great many times every day not to do these 
precise things which you dislike. But they themselves 
have been all the while doing those very things to 
him ; and there is no proverb which strikes a truer 
balance between two things than the old one which 
weighs example over against precept. 

However, that it is bad policy to be rude to children 
is the least of the things to be said against it. Over 
this they will triumph, sooner or later. The average 
healthy child has a native bias towards gracious good 
behavior and kindly affections. He will win and be 
won in the long run, and, the chances are, have better 
manners than his father. But the pain that we give 
these blessed little ones when we wound their tender- 
ness, — for that there is no atoning. Over that they 
can never triumph, either now or hereafter. Why do 
we dare to be so sure that they are not grieved by un- 
gracious words and tones ? that they can get used to 
being continually treated as if they were " in the way " ? 
Who has not heard this said ? I have, until I have 
longed for an Elijah and for fire, that the grown-up 
cumberers of the ground, who are the ones really in 
the way, might be burned up, to make room for the 
children. I believe that, if it were possible to counJ 
up in any one month, and show in the aggregate, aL 



32 BITS OF TALK. 

of this class of miseries borne by children, the wp'-H 
would cry out astonished. I know a little girl, ten 
years old, of nervous temperament, whose whole phys- 
ical condition is disordered, and seriously, by her 
mother's habitual atmosphere of rude fault-finding. 
She is a sickly, fretful, unhappy, almost unbearable 
child. If she lives to grow up, she will be a sickly, 
fretful, unhappy, unlovely woman. But her mother is 
just as much responsible for the whole as if she had 
deranged her system by feeding her on poisonous 
drugs. Yet she is a most conscientious, devoted, and 
anxious mother, and, in spite of this manner, a loving 
one. She does not know that there is any better way 
than hers. She does not see that her child is mortified 
and harmed when she says to her, in the presence of 
strangers, " How do you suppose you look with your 
mouth open like that ? " " Do you want me to show 
you how you are sitting?" — and then a grotesque 
imitation of her stooping shoulders. "Will you sit 
still for one minute ? " " Do take your hands off my 
dress." " Was there ever such an awkward child ? " 
When the child replies fretfully and disagreeably, she 
does not see that it is only an exact reflection of her 
own voice and manners. She does not understand any 
of the things that would make for her own peace, as 
well as for the child's. Matters grow worse, instead 
of better, as the child grows older and has more will ; 
and the chances are that the poor little soul will be 
worried into her grave. 

Probably most parents, even very kindly ones, would 



FEE INHUMANITIES OF PARENTS. 33 

be a little startled at the assertion that a child ought 
never to be reproved in the presence of others. This 
IS so constant an occurrence that nobody thinks of 
noticing it ; nobody thinks of considering whether 
it be right and best, or not. But it is a great rude- 
ness to a child. I am entirely sure that it ought 
never to be done. Mortification is a condition as 
unwholesome as it is uncomfortable. When the 
wound is inflicted by the hand of a parent, it is all 
the more certain to rankle and do harm. Let a child 
see that his mother is so anxious that he should have 
the approbation and good-will of her friends that she 
will not call their attention to his faults ; and that, 
while she never, under any circumstances, allows her- 
self to forget to tell him afterward, alone, if he has 
behaved improperly, she will spare him the additional 
pain and mortification of public reproof; and, while 
that child will lay these secret reproofs to heart, he 
will still be happy. 

I know a mother who had the insight to see this, 
and the patience to make it a rule ; for it takes far 
more patience, far more time, than the common 
method. 

She said sometimes to her little boy, after visitors 
had left the parlor, " Now, dear, I am going to be your 
little girl, and you are to be my papa. And we will 
play that a gentleman has just come in to see you, and 
I will show you exactly how you have been behaving 
while this lady has been calling to see me. And you 
can see if you do not feel very sorry to have your little 
girl behave so." 



34 BITS OF TALK. 

Here is a dramatic representation at once which 
that boy does not need to see repeated many times 
before he is forever cured of interrupting, of pulling 
his mother's gown, of drumming on the piano, &c., — 
of the thousand and one things which able-bodied 
children can do to make social visiting where they 
are a martyrdom and a penance. 

Once I saw this same little boy behave so boister- 
ously and rudely at the dinner-table, in the presence 
of guests, that I said to myself, '' Surely, this time she 
will have to break her rule, and reprove him publicly." 
I saw several telegraphic signals of rebuke, entreaty, 
and warning flash from her gentle eyes to his ; but 
nothing did any good. Nature was too much for him ; 
he could not at that minute force himself to be quiet. 
Presently she said, in a perfectly easy and natural 
tone, " Oh, Charley, come here a minute ; I w^ant to 
tell you something." No one at the table supposed 
that it had any thing to do with his bad behavior. She 
did not intend that they should. As she whispered to 
him, I alone saw his cheek flush, and that he looked 
quickly and imploringly into her face ; I alone saw that 
tears were almost in her eyes. But she shook her 
head, and he went back to his seat with a manful but 
very red little face. In a few moments he laid down 
his knife and fork, and said, " Mamma, will you please 
to exLUse me ? " *' Certainly, my dear," said she. 
Nobody but I understood it, or observed that the little 
fellow had to run very fast to get out of the room with- 
<>ut crying. Afterward she told me that she never sent 



THE INHUMANITIES OF PARENTS. 35 

a child away from the table in any other way. ** But 
what would you do," said I, " if he were to refuse to 
ask to be excused ? " Then the tears stood full in her 
eyes. "Do you think he could," she replied, "when 
he sees that I am only trying to save him from pain ? *' 
In the evening, Charley sat in my lap, and was very 
sober. At last he whispered to me, " I'll tell you an 
awful secret, if you won't tell. Did you think I had 
done my dinner this afternoon when I got excused ? 
Well, I hadn't. Mamma made me, because I acted 
so. That's the way she always does. But I haven't 
had to have it done to me before for ever so long, — 
not since I was a little fellow " (he was eight now) ; 
" and I don't beheve I ever shall again till I'm a man." 
Then he added, reflectively, " Mary brought me all the 
rest of my dinner upstairs ; but I wouldn't touch it, 
only a little bit of the ice-cream. I don't think I de- 
served any at all ; do you ? " 

I shall never, so long as I live, forget a lesson of 
this sort which my own mother once gave me. I was 
not more than seven years old ; but I had a great sus- 
ceptibility to color and shape in clothes, and an insatia- 
ble admiration for all people who came finely dressed. 
On2 day, my mother said to me, " Now I will play 
' house ' with you." Who does not remember when 
to ** play house " was their chief of plays ? And to 
whose later thought has it not occurred that in this 
mimic little show lay bound up the whole of life ? My 
mother was the liveliest of playmates, she took the 
worst doll, the broken tea-set, the shabby furniture, 



3^ BITS OF TALK. 

and the least convenient corner of the room for her 
establishment. Social life became a round of festivi- 
ties when she kept house as my opposite neighbor. 
At last, after the washing-day, and the baking-day, 
and the day when she took dinner with me, and the 
day when we took our children and walked out to- 
getlier, came the day for me to take my oldest child 
and go across to make a call at her house. Chill dis- 
comfort struck me on the very threshold of my visit. 
Where was the genial, laughing, talking lady who had 
been my friend up to that moment ? There she sat, 
stock-still, dumb, staring first at my bonnet, then at 
my shawl, then at my gown, then at my feet ; up and 
down, down and up, she scanned me, barely replying 
in monosyllables to my attempts at conversation ; 
finally getting up, and coming nearer, and examining 
my clothes, and my child's still more closely. A very 
few minutes of this were more than I could bear ; and, 
almost crying, I said, " Why, mamma, what makes 
you do so ? " Then the play was over ; and she was 
once more the wise and tender mother, telhng me play- 
fully that it was precisely in such a way I had stared, 
the day before, at the clothes of two ladies who had 
come in to visit her. I never needed that lesson 
again. To this day, if I find myself departing from 
it for an instant, the old tingling shame burns in my 
cheeks. 

To this day, also, the old tinghng pain burns my 
cheeks as I recall certain rude and contemptuous 
words which were said to me when I was very 



THE INHUMANITIES OF PARENTS. 37 

young, and stamped on my memory forever. I was 
once called a " stupid child " in the presence of 
strangers. I had brought the wrong boo]-' from 
my father's study. Nothing could be said to me to- 
day which would give me a tenth part of the hope- 
less sense of degradation which came from those 
words. Another time^ on the arrival of an unexpected 
guest to dinner, I was sent, in a great hurry, away 
from the table, to make room, with the remark that 
" it was not of the least consequence about the child ; 
she could just as well have her dinner afterward." 
" The child " would have been only too happy to help 
on the hospitahty of the sudden emergency, if the 
thing had been differently put ; but the sting of having 
it put in that way I never forgot. Yet in both these 
instances the rudeness was so small, in comparison 
with what we habitually see, that it would be too trivial 
to mention, except for the bearing of the fact that the 
pain it gave has lasted till now. 

When we consider seriously what ought to be the 
nature of a reproof from a parent to a child, and what 
is its end, the answer is simple enough. It should be 
nothing but the superior wisdom and strength, ex- 
plaining to inexperience and feebleness wherein they 
have made a mistake, to the end that they may avoid 
such mistakes in future. If personal annoyance, im- 
patience, antagonism enter in, the relation is marred 
and the end endangered. Most sacred and inalienable 
of all rights is the right of helplessness to protection 
from the strong, of ignorance to counsel from the wise 



38 BITS OF TALK, 

If we give our protection and counsel grudgingly, or 
in a churlish, unkind manner, even to the stranger 
that is in our gates, we are no Christians, and deserve 
to be stripped of what little wisdom and strength we 
have hoarded. But there are no words to say what 
we are or what we deserve if we do thus to the little 
children whom we have dared, for our own pleasure, 
to bring into the perils of this life, and whose whole 
future may be blighted by the mistakes of our careless 
hands. 



BREAKING THE WILL. 39 



BREAKING THE WILL. 

T^HIS phrase is going out of use. It is high time 
-*■ it did. If the thing it represents would also 
cease, there would be stronger and freer men and 
women. But the phrase is still sometimes heard ; and 
there are still conscientious fathers and mothers who 
believe they do God service in setting about the thing. 

I have more than once said to a parent who used 
these words, " Will you tell me just what you mean 
by that ? Of course you do not mean exactly what you 
say." 

" Yes, I do. I mean that the child's will is to be 
once for all broken ! — that he is to learn that my will 
is to be his law. The sooner he learns this the better." 

" But is it to your will simply as will that he is to 
yield ? Simply as the weaker yields to the stronger, 
— almost as matter yields to force ? For what reason 
i.s he to do this ? " 

" Why, because I know what is best for him, and 
what is right ; and he does not." 

" Ah ! that is a very different thing. He is, then, to 
do the thing that you tell him to do, because that thing 
is right and is needful for him ; you are his guide on a 
road over which you have gone, and he has not ; yoi? 



40 BITS OF TALK 

ve an interpreter, a helper ; you know bett^^r than he 
does about all things, and your knowledge is to teach 
his ignorance." 

" Certainly, that is what I mean. A pretty state of 
things it would be if children were to be allowed to 
think they know as much as their parents. There is 
no way except to break their wills in the beginning." 

" But you have just said that it is not to your will as 
will that he is to yield, but to your superior knowledge 
and experience. That surely is not ' breaking his will.* 
It is of all things furthest removed from it. It is edu- 
cating his will. It is teaching him how to will." 

This sounds dangerous ; but the logic is not easily 
turned aside, and there is little left for the advocate of 
will-breaking but to fall back on some texts in the 
Bible, which have been so often misquoted in this con- 
nection that one can hardly hear them with patience. 
To " Children, obey your parents," was added " in the 
Lord," and "because it is right," not " because they 
are your parents." " Spare the rod " has been quitt 
gratuitously assumed to mean " spare blows." " Rod " 
means here, as elsewhere, simply punishment. We 
are not told to " train up a child " to have no will but 
our own, but " in the way in which he should go," and 
to the end that " when he is old " he should not " de- 
part from it," — /. e., that his will should be so educated 
that he will choose to walk in the right way still. Sup- 
pose a child's will to be actually " broken ; " suppose 
him to be so trained that he has no will but to obey his 
parents. What is to become of this helpless machine. 



BREAKING THE WILL. 41 

which has no central spring of independent action ? 
Can we stand by, each minute of each hour of each day, 
and say to the automata, Go here, or Go there ? Can 
we be sure of living as long as they live ? Can we wind 
them up like seventy-year clocks, and leave them ? 

But this is idle. It is not, thank God, in the power 
of any man or any woman to " break " a child's " will.' 
They may kill the child's body, in trying, like that still 
unhung clergyman in Western New York, who whipped 
his three-year-old son to death for refusing to repeat a 
prayer to his step-mother. 

Bodies are frail things ; there are more child-martyrs 
than will be known until the bodies terrestrial are done 
with. 

But, by one escape or another, the will, the soul, goes 
free. Sooner or later, every human being comes to 
know and prove in his own estate that freedom of will 
is the only freedom for which there are no chains pos- 
sible, and that in Nature's whole reign of law nothing 
is so largely provided for as liberty. Sooner or later, 
all this must come. But, if it comes later, it comes 
through clouds of antagonism, and after days of fight, 
and is hard-bought. 

It should come sooner, like the kingdom of God, 
which it is, — " without observation," gracious as sun- 
shine, sweet as dew ; it should begin with the infant's 
first dawning of comprehension that there are two 
courses of action, two qualities of conduct : one wise, 
the other foolish ; one right, the other wrong. 

I am sure, for I have seen, that a child's moral per- 



f2 BITS OF TALK. 

captions can be so made clear, and his will so made 
strong and upright, that before he is ten years old he 
will see and take his way through all common days 
rightly and bravely. 

Will he always act up to his highest moral percep- 
tions ? No. Do we ? But one right decision that he 
makes voluntarily, unbiassed by the assertion of au- 
thority or the threat of punishment, is worth more to 
him in development of moral character than a thousand 
in which he simply does what he is compelled to do by 
some sort of outside pressure. 

I read once, in a book intended for the guidance of 
mothers, a story of a little child v/ho, in repeating his 
letters one day, suddenly refused to say A. All the 
other letters he repeated again and again, unhesita- 
tingly ; but A he would not, and persisted in declaring 
that he could not say. He was severely whipped, but 
still persisted. It now became a contest of wills. He 
was whipped again and again and again. In the inter- 
vals between the whippings the primer was presented 
to him, and he was told that he would be whipped 
again if he did not mind his mother and say A. I for- 
get how many times he was whipped ; but it was almost 
too many times to be believed. The fight was a terri- 
ble one. At last, in a paroxysm of his crying under 
the blows, the mother thought she heard him sob out 
*' A," and the victory was considered to be won. 

A little boy whom I know once had a similar contest 
over a letter of the alphabet ; but the contest was with 
himself, and his mother was the faithful Great Heart 



BREAKING THE WILL. 43 

vjrho helped him through. The story is so remarkable 
that I have long wanted all mothers to know it. It is 
as perfect an illustration of what I mean by " educat- 
ing" the will as the other one is of what is called 
*' breaking" it. 

Willy was about four years old. He had a large, 
active brain, sensitive temperament, and indomitable 
spirit. He was and is an uncommon child. Common 
methods of what is commonly supposed to be " discir 
pline " would, if he had survived them, have made a 
very bad boy of him. He had great difficulty in pro- 
nouncing the letter G, — so much that he had formed 
almost a habit of omitting it. One day his mother said, 
not dreaming of any special contest, " This time you 
must say G." " It is an ugly old letter, and I ain't 
ever going to try to say it again,'' said Willy, repeating 
the alphabet very rapidly from beginning to end, with- 
out the G. Like a wise mother, she did not open at 
once on a struggle ; but said, pleasantly, " Ah ! you 
did not get it in that time. Try again ; go more slowly, 
and we will have it." It was all in vain ; and it soon 
began to look more like real obstinacy on Willy's part 
than any thing she had ever seen in him. She has 
often told me how she hesitated before entering on the 
campaign. " I always knew," she said, " that Willy's 
Srst real fight with himself would be no matter of a 
few hours ; and it was a particularly inconvenient time 
for me, just then, to give up a day to it. But it seemed, 
OD the whole, best not to put it off." 

So she said, " Now, Willy, you can't get along with« 



44 BITS OF TALK 

out the letter G. The longer you put off saying it, the 
harder it will be for you to say it at last ; and we will 
have it settled now, once for all. You are never going 
to let a little bit of a letter hke that be stronger than 
Willy. We will not go out of this room till you have 
said it." 

Unfortunately, Willy's will had already taken its 
stand. However, the mother made no authoritative 
demand that he should pronounce the letter as a mat- 
ter of obedience to her. Because it was a thing in- 
trinsically necessary for him to do, she would see, at 
any cost to herself or to him, that he did it ; but he 
must do it voluntarily, and she would wait till he did. 

The morning wore on. She busied herself with 
other matters, and left Willy to himself; now and then 
asking, with a smile, " Well, isn't my little boy stronger 
than that ugly old letter yet 1 " 

Willy was sulky. He understood in that early stage 
all that was involved. Dinner-time came. 

*' Aren't you going to dinner, mamma .' '' 

" Oh ! no, dear ; not unless you say G, so that you 
can go too. Mamma will stay by her Httle boy until 
he is out of this trouble." 

The dinner was brought up, and they ate it together. 
She was cheerful and kind, but so serious that he felt 
the constant pressure of her pain. 

The afternoon dragged slowly on to night. Willy 
cried now and then, and she took him in her lap, and 
said, " Dear, you will be happy as soon as you say 
that letter, and mamma will be happy too, and we can't 
either of us be happy until you do.'* 



BREAKING THE WILL. 45 

** Oh, mamma ! why don't you make me say it ? " 

(This he said several times before the affair was 
over.) 

" Because, dear, you must make yourself say it. I 
am helping you make yourself say it, for I shall not let 
you go out of this room, nor go out myself, till you do 
Bay it ; but that is all I shall do to help you. I am 
listening, listening all the time, and if you say it, in 
ever so little a whisper, I shall hear you. That is all 
mamma can do for you." 

Bed-time came. Willy went to bed, unkissed and 
sad. The next morning, when Willy's mother opened 
her eyes, she saw Willy sitting up in his crib, and look- 
ing at her steadfastly. As soon as he saw that she was 
awake, he exclaimed, " Mamma, I can't say it ; and 
you know I can't say it. You're a naughty mamma, 
and you don't love me." Her heart sank within her ; 
but she patiently went again and again over yester- 
day's ground. Willy cried. He ate very little break 
fast. He stood at the window in a listless attitude of 
discouraged misery, which she said cut her to the 
heart. Once in a while he would ask for some play- 
thing which he did not usually have. She gave him 
whatever he asked for ; but he could not play. She 
kept up an appearance of being busy with her sewing, 
but she was far more unhappy than Willy. 

Dinner was brought up to them. Willy said, 
'* Mamma, this ain't a bit good dinner." 

She replied, "Yes, it is, darling; just as good as 
we ever have. It is only because we are eating it 



{6 BITS OF TALK 

alone. And poor papa is sad, too, taking h\s all alone 
downstairs." 

At this Willy burst out into an hysterical fit of cry- 
ing and sobbing. 

" I shall never see my papa again in this world." 

Then his mother broke down, too, and cried as hard 
as he did ; but she said, " Oh ! yes, you will, dear. I 
think you will say that letter before tea-time, and we 
will have a nice evening downstairs together.'^ 

" I can't say it. I try all the time, and I can't say 
it; and, if you keep me here till I die, I shan't eveif 
say it." 

The second night settled down dark and gloomy, and 
Willy cried himself to sleep. His mother was ill from 
anxiety and confinement ; but she never faltered. She 
told me she resolved that night that, if it were neces- 
sary, she would stay in that room with Willy a month. 
The next morning she said to him, more seriously than 
before, "Now, Willy, you are not only a fooHsh httle 
boy, you are unkind ; you are making everybody un- 
happy. Mamma is very sorry for you, but she is also 
very much displeased with you. Mamma will stay here 
with you till you say that letter, if it is for the rest of 
your life ; but mamma will not talk with you, as she did 
yesterday. She tried all day yesterday to help you, 
and you would not help yourself; to-day you must do 
it al. alone." 

" Mamma, are you sure I shall ever say it ? '' asked 
Willy. 

" Yes, dear ; perfectly sure. You will say it some 
day or other," 



BREAKING THE WILL. 47 

" Do you think I shall say it to-day ? " 

" I can't tell. You are not so strong a little boy as 
I thought. I believed you would say it yesterday. I 
am afraid you have some hard work before you." 

Willy begged her to go down and leave him alone. 
Then he begged her to shut him up in the closet, and 
"see if that wouldn't make him good." Every few 
minutes he would come and stand before her, and say 
very earnestly, " Are you sure I shall say it 1 " 

He looked very pale, almost as if he had had a fit of 
illness. No wonder. It was the whole battle of life 
fought at the age of four. 

It was late in the afternoon of this the third day. 
Willy had been sitting in his little chair, looking 
steadily at the floor, for so long a time that his mother 
was almost frightened. But she hesitated to speak to 
him, for she felt that the crisis had come. Suddenly 
he sprang up, and walked toward her with all the de- 
liberate firmness of a man in his whole bearing. She 
says there was something in his face which she has 
never seen since, and does not expect to see till he is 
thirty years old. 

" Mamma ! " said he. 

" Well, dear ? " said his mother, trembling so that 
she could hardly speak. 

" Mamma," he repeated, in a loud, sharp tone, " G ] 
G ! G ! G ! " And then he burst into a fit of crying, 
which she had hard work to stop. It was over. 

Willy is now ten years old. From that day to thiJs 
his mother has never had a contest with him ; she ha.^ 



4^ BITS OF TALK, 

always been able to leave all practical questions affect- 
ing his behavior to his own decision, merely saying, 
"■ Willy, I think this or that will be better." 

His self-control and gentleness are wonderful to see ; 
and the blending in his face of childlike simplicity and 
purity with manly strength is something which I have 
only once seen equalled. 

For a few days he went about the house, shouting 
" G ! G ! G ! " at the top of his voice. He was heard 
asking playmates if they could '* say G," and ^' who 
showed them how." For several years he used often 
to allude to the affair, saying, " Do you remember, 
mamma, that dreadful time when I wouldn't say G ? " 
He always used the verb "wouldn't" in speaking of 
it. Once, when he was sick, he said, " Mamma, do 
you think I could have said G any sooner than I 
did 1 " 

" I have never felt certain about that, Willy," she 
said. " What do you think 1 " 

" I think I could have said it a few minutes sooner. 
I was saying it to myself as long as that ! " said Willy, 

It was singular that, although up to that time he had 
never been able to pronounce the letter with any dis- 
tinctness, when he first made up his mind in this in- 
stance to say it, he enunciated it with perfect clearness, 
and never again went back to the old, imperfect pro- 
nunciation. 

Few mothers, perhaps, would be able to give up two 
whole days to such a battle as this ; other children, 
other duties, would interfere. But the same principle 



BREAKING THE WILL, 49 

could be carried out without the mother's remaining 
herself by the child's side all the time. Moreover, not 
one child in a thousand would hold out as Willy did. 
In all ordinary cases a few hours would suffice. And, 
after all, what would the sacrifice of even two days be, 
in comparison with the time saved in years to come ? 
If there were no stronger motive than one of policy, of 
desire to take the course easiest to themselves, mothers 
might well resolve that their first aim should be to edu- 
cate their children's wills and make them strong, va.' 
9tead of to conquer and << break. " theio* 



%0 BITS OF TALK. 



THE REIGN OF ARCHELAUS. 

TTEROD'S massacre had, after all, a certain mercy 
■*■■*■ in it : there were no lingering tortures. The 
slayers of children went about with naked and bloody 
swords, which mothers could see, and might at least 
make effort to flee from. Into RachePs refusal to be com- 
forted there need enter no bitter agonies of remorse. 
But Herod's death, it seems, did not make Judea a safe 
place for babies. When Joseph "heard that Arche- 
laus did reign in the room of his father, Herod, he was 
afraid to return thither with the infant Jesus," and only 
after repeated commands and warnings from God would 
he venture as far as Nazareth. The reign of Arche- 
laus is not yet over ; he has had many names, and ruled 
over more and more countries, but the spirit of his 
father, Herod, is still in him. To-day his power is at 
its zenith. He is called Education ; and the safest 
place for the dear, holy children is still Egypt, or 
some other of the fortunate countries called unen- 
lightened. 

Some years ago there were symptoms of a strong 
rebellion against his tyranny. Horace Mann lifted up 



THE REIGN OF ARCH E LA US. 51 

his strong hands and voice against it ; physicians and 
physiologists came out gravely and earnestly, and for- 
tified their positions with statistics from which there 
was no appeal. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whose 
words have with the light, graceful beauty of the Da- 
mascus blade its swift sureness in cleaving to the heart 
of things, wrote an article for the "Atlantic Monthly" 
called " The Murder of the Innocents," which I wish 
could be put into every house in the United States. 
Some changes in school organizations resulted from 
these protests ; in the matter of ventilation of school- 
rooms some real improvement was probably effected ; 
though we shudder to think how much room remains 
for further improvement, when we read in the report 
of the superintendent of public schools in Brooklyn 
that in the primary departments of the grammar schools 
" an average daily number of 33,275 pupils are crowded 
into one-half the space provided in the upper de- 
partments for an average daily attendance of 26,359 5 
or compelled to occupy badly lighted, inconvenient, 
and ill-ventilated galleries, or rooms in the basement 
stories." 

But in regard to the number of hours of confinement, 
and amount of study required of children, it is hard to 
believe that schools have ever been much more mur- 
derously exacting than now. 

The substitution of the single session of five hours 
for the old arrangement of two sessions of three hours 
each, with a two-hours interval at noon, was regarded 
as a great gain. So it would be, if all the brain-work 



ia BITS OF TALK, 

of the day were done in that tin^e ; but in most schools 
with the five-hours session, there is next to no pro- 
vision for studying in school-hours, and the pupils are 
required to learn two, three, or four lessons at home. 
Now, when is your boy to learn these lessons ? Not 
in the morning, before school ; that is plain. School 
ends at two. Few children live sufficiently near their 
schools to get home to dinner before half past two 
o'clock. We say nothing of the undesirableness of 
taking the hearty meal of the day immediately after five 
hours of mental fatigue ; it is probably a less evil than 
the late dinner at six, and we are in a region where we 
are grateful for less evils ! Dinner is over at quarter 
past three ; we make close estimates. In winter there 
IS left less than two hours before dark. This is all the 
Hme the child is to have for out-door play ; two hours 
and a half (counting in his recess) out of twenty-four. 
Ask any farmer, even the stupidest, how well his colt 
or his lamb would grow if it had but two hours a day of 
absolute freedom and exercise in the open air, and that 
in the dark and the chill of a late afternoon ! In spite 
of the dark and the chill, however, your boy skates or 
slides on until he is called in by you, who, if you are 
an American mother, care a great deal more than he 
does for the bad marks which will stand on his week's 
report if those three lessons are not learned before bed- 
time. He is tired and cold ; he does not want to study 
— who would ? It is six o'clock before he is fairly at it. 
You work harder than he does, and in half an hour one 
lesson is learned ; then comes tea. After tea half an 



THE REIGN OF ARCHELAUS, 53 

hour, or perhaps an hour, remains before bed-time ; in 
this time, which ought to be spent in light, cheerful 
talk or play, the rest of the lessons must be learned. 
He is sleepy and discouraged. Words which in the 
freshness of the morning he would have learned in a 
very few moments with ease, it is now simply out of 
his power to commit to memory. You, if you are not 
superhuman, grow impatient. At eight o'clock he goes 
to bed, his brain excited and wearied, in no condition 
for healthful sleep ; and his heart oppressed with the 
fear of " missing " in the next day's recitations. And 
this is one out of the school-year's two hundred and 
sixteen days — all of which will be like this, or worse. 
One of the most pitiful sights we have seen for months 
was a little group of four dear children, gathered round 
the library lamp, trying to learn the next day's lessons 
in time to have a story read to them before going to 
bed. They had taken the precaution to learn one les- 
son immediately after dinner, before going out, cutting 
their out-door play down by half an hour. The two 
elder were learning a long spelling-lesson ; the third 
was grappling with geographical definitions of capes, 
promontories, and so forth ; and the youngest was at 
work on his primer. In spite of all their efforts, bed- 
time came before the lessons were learned. The little 
geography student had been nodding over her book for 
some minutes, and she had the philosophy to say, "I 
don't care ; I'm so sleepy. I had rather go to bed than 
h'ear any kind of a story." But the elder ones were 
grieved and unhappy, and said, '' There won't ever be 



54 BITS OF TALK. 

any time ; we shall have just as much more to learn 
to-morrow night." The next morning, however, there 
was a sight still more pitiful : the child of seven, with 
a little bit of paper and a pencil, and three sums in 
addition to be done, and the father vainly endeavoring 
to explain them to him in the hurried moments before 
breakfast. It would be easy to show how fatal to all 
real mental development, how false to all Nature's laws 
of growth, such a system must be ; but that belongs to 
another side of the question. We speak now simply 
of the effect of it on the body ; and here we quote 
largely from the admirable article of Col. Higginson^s, 
above mentioned. No stronger, more direct, more 
conclusive words can be written : — 

" Sir Walter Scott, according to Carlyle, was the 
only perfectly healthy literary man who ever lived. 
He gave it as his deliberate opinion, in conversation 
with Basil Hall, that five and a half hours form* the 
limit of healthful mental labor for a mature person. 

* This I reckon very good work for a man,' he said. 

* I can very seldom work six hours a day.' Supposing 
nis estimate to be correct, and five and a half hours 
the reasonable limit for the day's work of a mature 
intellect, it is evident that even this must be altogether 
too much for an immature one. * To suppose the 
youthful brain,' says the recent admirable report, by Dr. 
Ray, of the Providence Insane Hospital, * to be capa- 
ble of an amount of work which is considered an am- 
ple allowance to an adult brain is simply absurd.' * II 
would be wrong, therefore, to deduct less than a half- 



THE REIGN OF ARCHELAUS, 35 

hour from Scott's estimate, for even the oldest pupils 
in our highest schools, leaving five hours as the limit 
of real mental effort for them, and reducing this for a^ 
younger pupils very much further.' 

" But Scott is not the only authority in the case ; 
let us ask the physiologists. So said Horace Mann 
before us, in the days when the Massachusetts school 
system was in process of formation. He asked the 
physicians in 1840, and in his report printed the an- 
swers of three of the most eminent. The late Dr. 
Woodward, of Worcester, promptly said that chil- 
dren under eight should never be confined more 
than one hour at a time, nor more than four hours a 
day. 

" Dr. James Jackson, of Boston, allowed the chil- 
dren four hours schooling in winter and five in sum- 
mer, but only one hour at a time ; and heartily 
expressed his detestation of giving young children 
lessons to learn at home. * 

" Dr. S. G. Howe, reasoning elaborately on the 
whole subject, said that children under eight years of 
age should never be confined more than half an hour 
at a time ; by following which rule, with long recesses, 
they can study four hours daily. Children between 
eight and fourteen should not be confined more 
than three-quarters of an hour at a time, having the 
last quarter of each hour for exercise oa the play- 
ground. 

" Indeed, the one thing about which doctors do not 
disagree is the destructive effect of premature or ex* 



56 BITS OA TALK. 

cessive i?^ental labor. I can quote you medical aulhcr* 
ity for and against every maxim of dietetics beyond the 
very simplest ; but I defy you to find one man who 
ever begged, borrowed, or stole the title of M.D., and 
yet abused those two honorary letters by asserting 
under their cover that a child could safely study as 
much as a man, or that a man could safely study more 
than six hours a day." 

" The worst danger of it is that the moral is written 
at the end of the fable, not at the beginning. The 
organization in youth is so dangerously elastic that the 
result of these intellectual excesses is not seen until 
years after. When some young girl incurs spinal 
disease from some slight fall, which she ought not to 
have felt for an hour, or some business man breaks 
down in the prime of his years from some trifling 
over-anxiety, which should have left no trace behind, 
the popular verdict may be ^ Mysterious Providence ; ' 
but the wiser observer sees the retribution for the 
folly of those misspent days which enfeebled the child- 
ish constitution instead of ripening it. One of the 
most striking passages in the report of Dr. Ray, before 
mentioned, is that in which he explains that, * though 
study at school is rarely the immediate cause of in- 
sanity, it is the most frequent of its ulterior causes, 
except hereditary tendencies.' // diminishes the co7t- 
servative power of the animal economy to such a de- 
gree that attacks of disease which otherwise would 
have passed off safely destroy life almost before dangey 
is anticipated^ 



THE REIGN OF ARCHELAUS. $1 

It would be easy to multiply authorities on these 
points. It is hard to stop. But our limits forbid any 
thing like a full treatment of the subject. Yet discus- 
sion on this question ought never to cease in the land 
until a reform is brought about. Teachers are to 
blame only in part for the present wrong state of 
things. They are to blame for yielding, for acquiesc- 
ing ; but the real blame rests on parents. Here and 
there, individual fathers and mothers, taught, per- 
haps, by heart-rending experience, try to make stand 
against the current of false ambitions and unhealthy 
standards. But these are rare exceptions. Parents, 
as a class, not only help on, but create the pressure to 
which teachers yield, and children are sacrificed. The 
whole responsibility is really theirs. They have in 
their hands the power to regulate the whole school 
routine to which their children are to be subjected. 
This is plain, when we once consider what would be 
the immediate effect in any community, large or small, 
if a majority of parents took action together, and per- 
sistently refused to allow any child under fourteen to 
be confined in school more than four hours out of the 
twenty-four, more than one hour at a time, or to do more 
than five hours' brain-work in a day. The law of sup- 
ply and demand is a first principle. In three months 
the schools in that community would be entirely re- 
organized, to accord with the parents' wishes ; in three 
years the improved average health of the children in 
that community would bear its own witness in ruddy 
bloom along the streets ; and perhaps even in one 



5S BITS OF TALK, 

generation so great gain of vigor might be made 
that the melancholy statistics of burial would no 
longer have to record the death under twelve years 
of age of more than two-fifths of the children who 
are boriL 



THE AWKWARD AGE. 59 



THE AWKWARD AGE. 



T^HE expression defines itself. At the first sound 
•^ of the words, we all think of some one unhappy 
soul we know just now, whom they suggest. Nobody 
is ever without at least one brother, sister, cousin, or 
friend on hand, who is struggling through this social 
slough of despond ; and nobody ever will be, so long 
iS the world goes on taking it for granted that the 
islough is a necessity, and that the road must go 
through it. Nature never meant any such thing. Now 
and then she blunders or gets thwarted of her intent, 
and turns out a person who is awkward, hopelessly and 
forever awkward ; body and soul are clumsy together, 
and it is hard to fancy them translated to the spiritual 
world without too much elbow and ankle. However, 
these are rare cases, and come in under the law of 
variation. But an awkward age, — a necessary crisis 
or stage of uncouthness, through which all human be- 
ings must pass, — Nature was incapable of such a con- 
ception ; law has no place for it ; development does not 
know it ; instinct revolts from it ; and man is the only 
animal who has been silly and wrong-headed enough 
to stumble into it. The explanation and the remedy 



6o BITS OF TALK, 

are so simple, so close at hand, that we have not seen 
them. The whole thing hes in a nutshell. Where does 
this abnormal, uncomfortable period come in ? Between 
childhood, we say, and maturity ; it is the transition 
from one to the other. When human beings, then, are 
neither boys nor men, girls nor women, they must be 
for a few years anomalous creatures, must they ? We 
might, perhaps, find a name for the individual in this 
condition as well as for the condition. We must look 
to Du Chaillu for it, if we do ; but it is too serious a 
distress to make light of, even for a moment. We have 
all felt it, and we know how it feels ; we all see it every 
day, and we know how it looks. 

What is it which the child has and the adult loses, 
from the loss of which comes this total change of be- 
havior? Or is it something which the adult has and 
the child had not ? It is both ; and until the loss and 
the gain, the new and the old, are permanently sep- 
arated and balanced, the awkward age lasts. The child 
was overlooked, contradicted, thwarted, snubbed, in- 
sulted, whipped ; not constantly, not often, — in many 
cases, thank God, very seldom. But the liability was 
there, and he knew it ; he never forgot it, if you did 
One burn is enough to make fire dreaded. The adult, 
once fairly recognized as adult, is not overlooked, 
contradicted, thwarted, snubbed, insulted, whipped; at 
least, not with impunity. To this gratifying freedom, 
these comfortable exemptions, when they are once es- 
tablished in our belief, we adjust ourselves, and gro^ 
contentedly good-mannered. To the other regime 



THE AWKWARD AGE, Ol 

irhile we were yet children, we also somewhat adjusted 
ourselves, were tolerably well behaved, and made the 
best of it. But who could bear a mixture of both ? 
What genius could rise superior to it, could be itself 
surrounded by such uncertainties ? 

No wonder that your son comes into the room with 
a confused expression of uncomfortable pain on every 
feature, when he does not in the least know whether he 
will be recognized as a gentleman, or overlooked as a 
little boy. No wonder he sits down in his chair with 
movements suggestive of nothing but rheumatism and 
jack-knives, when he is thinking that perhaps there may 
be some reason why he should not take that particular 
chair, and that, if there is, he will be ordered up. 

No wonder that your tall daughter turns red, stam- 
mers, and says foolish things on being courteously 
spoken to by strangers at dinner, when she is afraid 
that she may be sharply contradicted or interrupted, 
and remembers that day before yesterday she was told 
that children should be seen and not heard. 

I knew a very clever girl, who had the misfortune to 
look at fourteen as if she were twenty. At home, she 
was the shyest and most awkward of creatures ; away 
from her mother and sisters, she was self-possessed and 
charming. She said to me, once, " Oh ! I have such a 
splendid time away from home. Pm so tall, everybody 
thinks I am grown up, and everybody is civil to me." 

I know, also, a man of superb physique, charming 
temperament, and uncommon talent, who is to this day 
— and he is twenty-five years old — nervous and ill at 



62 BITS OF TALK. 

ease in talking with strangers, in the presence of his 
own family. He hesitates, stammers, and never does 
justice to his thoughts. He says that he believes he 
shall never be free from this distress ; he cannot escape 
from the recollections of the years between fourteen 
and twenty, during v/hich he was so systematically 
snubbed that his mother's parlor was to him worse 
than the chambers of the Inquisition. He knows that 
he is now sure of courteous treatment ; that his friends 
are all proud of him ; but the old cloud will never en- 
tirely disappear. Something has been lost which can 
never be regained. And the loss is not his alone, it is 
theirs too ; they are all poorer for life, by reason of the 
unkind days which are gone. 

This, then, is the explanation of the awkward age. 
I am not afraid of any dissent from my definition of 
the source whence its misery springs. Everybody's 
consciousness bears witness. Everybody knows, in 
the bottom of his heart, that, however much may be 
said about the change of voice, the thinness of cheeks, 
the sharpness of arms, the sudden length in legs and 
lack of length in trousers and frocks, — all these had 
nothing to do with the real misery. The real misery 
was simply and solely the horrible feeling of not be- 
longing anywhere ; not knowing what a moment might 
bring forth in the way of treatment from others ; never 
being sure which impulse it would be safer to follow, to 
retreat or to advance, to speak or to be silent, and often 
overwhelmed with unspeakable mortification at the re- 
buff of the one or the censure of the other. Oh ! how 



THE AWKWARD AGE, 63 

dreadful it all was ! How dreadful it all is, even to 
remember ! It would be malicious even to refer to it, 
except to point out the cure. 

The cure is plain. It needs no experiment to test 
it. Merely to mention it ought to be enough. If hu- 
man beings are so awkward at this unhappy age, and 
so unhappy at this awkward age, simply because they 
do not know whether they are to be treated as children 
or ^s adults, suppose we make a rule that children are 
always to be treated, in point of courtesy, as if they 
were adults ? Then this awkward age — this period 
of transition from an atmosphere of, to say the least, 
negative rudeness to one of gracious politeness — dis- 
appears. There cannot be a crisis of readjustment of 
social relations : there is no possibility of such a feel- 
ing ; it would be hard to explain to a young person 
what it meant. Now and then we see a young man or 
young woman who has never known it. .They are 
usually only children, and are commonly spoken of as 
wonders. I know such a boy to-day. At seventeen he 
measures six feet in height ; he has the feet and the 
hands of a still larger man ; and he comes of a blood 
which had far more strength than grace. But his man- 
ner is, and always has been, sweet, gentle, composed, 
-rthe very ideal of grave, tender, frank young man- 
hood. People say, " How strange ! He never seemed 
to have any awkward age at all." It would have been 
stranger if he had. Neither his father nor his mother 
ever departed for an instant, in their relations with him, 
from the laws of courtesy and kindliness of demeanor 
which g^overned their relations with others. 



64 BITS OF TALK. 

He knew but one atmosphere, and that a genial one, 
from his babyhood up ; and in and of this atmosphere 
has grown up a sweet, strong, pure soul, for which the 
quiet, self-possessed manner is but the fitting garb. 

This is part of the kingdom that cometh unobserved. 
In this kingdom we are all to be kings and priests, if 
we choose ; and all its ways are pleasantness. But we 
are not ready for it till we have become peaceable and 
easy to be entreated, and have learned to understand 
why it was that one day, when Jesus called his dis- 
ciples together, he set a little child in their midst 



A DAY WITH A COURTEOUS MOTHER, 65 



A DAY WITH A COURTEOUS MOTHER. 

TOURING the whole of one of last summer's hot- 
^^ test days I had the good fortune to be seated in 
a railway car near a mother and four children, whose 
relations with each other were so beautiful that the 
pleasure of watching them was quite enough to make 
one forget the discomforts of the journey. 

It was plain that they were poor ; their clothes were 
coarse and old, and had been made by inexperienced 
hands. The mother's bonnet alone would have been 
enough to have condemned the whole party on any of 
the world's thoroughfares. I remembered afterward, 
with shame, that I myself had smiled at the first sight 
of its antiquated ugliness ; but her face was one which 
it gave you a sense of rest to look upon, — it was 
so earnest, tender, true, and strong. It had little 
comeliness of shape or color in it, it w^as thin, and 
pale ; she was not young ; she had worked hard ; she 
had evidently been much ill ; but I have seen few 
faces which gave me such pleasure. I think that she 
was the wife of a poor clergyman ; and I think that 
clergyman must be one of the Lord's best watchmen 
of souls. The children — two boys and two girls -* 
5 



66 BITS OF TALK. 

were all under the age of twelve, and the youngest 
could not speak plainly. They had had a rare treat ; 
they had been visiting the mountains, and they were 
talking over all the wonders they had seen with a glow 
of enthusiastic delight which was to be envied. Only 
a word-for-word record would do justice to their con- 
versation ; no description could give any idea of it, — 
so free, so pleasant, so genial, no interruptions, no 
contradictions ; and the mother's part borne all the 
while with such equal interest and eagerness that no 
one not seeing her face would dream that she was any 
other than an elder sister. In the course of the day 
there were many occasions when it was necessary foi 
her to deny requests, and to ask services, especially 
from the eldest boy ; but no young girl, anxious to 
please a lover, could have done either with a more 
tender courtesy. She had her reward ; for no lover 
could have been more tender and manly than was this 
boy of twelve. Their lunch was simple and scanty ; 
but it had the grace of a royal banquet. At the last, 
the mother produced with much glee three apples and 
an orange, of which the children had not known. All 
eyes fastened on the orange. It was evidently g 
great rarity. I watched to see if this test would bring 
out selfishness. There was a little silence ; just the 
shade of a cloud. The mother said, '* How shall I 
divide this ? There is one for each of you ; and I 
shall be best off of all, for I expect big tastes from 
each of you." 

" Oh, give Annie the orange. Annie loves oranges,* 



A DAY WITH A COURTEOUS MOTHER. 6 J 

spoke out the oldest boy, with a sudden air of a con- 
queror, and at the same time taking the smallest and 
worst apple himself. 

" Oh, yes, let Annie have the orange," echoed the 
second boy, nine years old. 

" Yes, Annie may have the orange, because that is 
nicer than the apple, and she is a lady^ and her broth- 
ers are gentlemen," said the mother, quietly. Then 
there was a merry contest as to who should feed the 
mother v/ith largest and m.ost frequent mouthfuls ; and 
so the feast went on. Then Annie pretended to want 
apple, and exchanged thin golden strips of orange for 
bites out of the cheeks of Baldwins ; and, as I sat 
watching her intently, she suddenly fancied she saw 
longing in my face, and sprang over to me, holding 
out a quarter of her orange, and saying, " Don't you 
want a taste, too ? " The mother smiled, understand- 
ingiy, when I said, " No, I thank you, you dear, gener- 
ous little girl ; I don't care about oranges." 

At noon we had a tedious interval of waiting at a 
dreary station. We sat for two hours on a narrow 
platform, which the sun had scorched till it smelt of 
heat. The oldest boy — the little lover — held the 
youngest child, and talked to her, while the tired 
mother closed her eyes and rested. Now and then he 
looked over at her, and then back at the baby ; and at 
last he said confidentially to me (for we had became 
fast friends by this time), " Isn't it funny, to think that 
I v/as ever so small as this baby ? And papa says thai 
Jien mamma was almost a little girl herself." 



68 BITS OF TALK. 

The two other children were toiling up and down 
the banks of the railroad-track, picking ox-eye daisies, 
buttercups, and sorrel. They worked like beavers, 
and soon the bunches were almost too big for their 
little hands. Then they came running to give them to 
their mother. " Oh dear," thought I, " how that poor, 
tired woman will hate to open her eyes ! and she never 
can take those great bunches of common, fading flow- 
ers, in addition to all her bundles and bags." I was 
mistaken. 

" Oh, thank you, my darlings ! How kind you 
were ! Poor, hot, tired little flowers, how thirsty they 
look! If they will only try and keep alive till we get 
home, we will make them very happy in some water ; 
won't we ? And you shall put one bunch by papa's 
plate, and one by mine." 

Sweet and happy, the weary and flushed little chil- 
dren stood looking up in her face while she talked, 
their hearts thrilhng with compassion for the drooping 
flowers and with delight in the giving of their gift. 
Then she took great trouble to get a string and tie up 
the flowers, and then the train came, and we were 
whirling along again. Soon it grew dark, and little 
Annie's head nodded. Then I heard the mother say 
to the oldest boy, " Dear, are you too tired to let little 
Ann^.e put her head on your shoulder and take a nap ? 
We shall get her home in much better case to see 
papa if we can manage to give her a little sleep." How 
many boys of twelve hear such words as these from 
tired,» overburdened mothers ? 



M 



A DAY WITH A COURTEOUS MOTHER. 69 

Soon came the city, the final station, with its bustle 
and noise. I lingered to watch my happy family, 
hoping to see the father. " Why, papa isn't here ! " 
exclaimed one disappointed little voice after another. 
" Never mind," said the mother, with a still deeper 
disappointment in her own tone ; " perhaps he had to 
go to see some poor body who is sick." In the hurry 
of picking up all the parcels, and the sleepy babies, 
the poor daisies and buttercups were left forgotten in 
a corner of the rack. I wondered if the mother had 
not intended this. May I be forgiven for the injus- 
tice ! A few minutes after I passed the little group, 
standing still just outside the station, and heard the 
mother say, " Oh, my darlings, I have forgotten your 
pretty bouquets. I am so sorry ! I wonder if I could 
find them if I went back. Will you all stand still and 
not stir from this spot if I go ? " 

" Oh, mamma, don't go, don't go. We will get you 
some more. Don't go," cried all the children. 

" Here are your flowers, madam," said I. " I saw 
that you had forgotten them, and I took them as me- 
mentoes of you and your sweet children." She blushed 
and looked disconcerted. She was evidently unused 
to people, and shy with all but her children. How- 
ever, she thanked me sweetly, and said, — 

" I was very sorry about them. The children took 
such trouble to get them ; and I think they will revive 
in water. They cannot be quite dead." 

" They will never die ! " said I, with an emphasis 
which went from my heart to hers. Then all her shy- 



70 BITS OF TALK. 

ness fled. She knew me ; and we shook hands, and 
smiled into each other's eyes with the smile of kindred 
as we parted. 

As I followed on, I heard the two children, who 
were walking behind, saying to each other, " Wouldn't 
that have been too bad ? Mamma liked them so much, 
and we never could have got so many all at once 
again." 

" Yes, we could, too, next summer," said the boy, 
sturdily. 

They are sure of their " next summers," I think, all 
six of those souls, — children, and mother, and father. 
They may never again gather so many ox-eye daisies 
and buttercups " all at once." Perhaps some of the 
little hands have already picked their last flowers. 
Nevertheless, their summers are certain. To such 
souls as these, all trees, either here or in God's largei 
country, are Trees of Life, with twelve manner of fruits 
and leaves for healing ; and it is but little change from 
the summers here, whose suns burn and make weary, 
to the summers there, of which " the Lamb is the 
light." 

Heaven bless them all, wherever they are. 



CHILDREN IN NOVA SCOTIA. 7l 



CHILDREN IN NOVA SCOTIA. 

'^rOVA SCOTIA is a country of gracious surprises. 
-*" ^ Instead of the stones which are what strangers 
chiefly expect at her hands, she gives us a wealth of 
fertile meadow^s ; instead of stormy waves breaking on 
a frowning coast, she shows us smooth basins whose 
shores are soft and wooded to the water's edge, and 
into which empty wonderful tidal rivers, whose courses, 
where the tide-water has flowed out, lie like curving 
bands of bright brown satin among the green fields. 
She has no barrenness, no unsightliness, no poverty ; 
everywhere beauty, everywhere riches. She is biding 
her time. 

But most beautiful among her beauties, most won- 
derful among her wonders, are her children. During 
two weeks' travel in the provinces, I have been con- 
stantly more and more impressed by their superiority 
in appearance, size, and health to the children of the 
New England and Middle States. In the outset of our 
journey I w^as struck by it ; along all the roadsides they 
looked up, boys and girls, fair, broad-cheeked, sturdy- 
legged, such as with us are seen only now and then. 
I did not, however, realize at first that this was the 
universal law of the land, and that it pointed to some- 



72 BITS OF TALK. 

thing more than climate as a cause. But the first school 
that I saw, en masse^ gave a startling impetus to the 
train of observation and inference into which I was 
unconsciously falling. It was a Sunday school in the 
little town of Wolfville, which lies between the Gasp- 
creau and Cornwallis rivers, just beyond the meadows 
of the Grand Pr^, where lived Gabriel Lajeunesse, and 
Benedict Bellefontaine, and the rest of the "simple 
Acadian farmers." 

" Mists from the mighty Atlantic " more than " looked 
on the happy valley " that Sunday morning. Convict- 
ing Longfellow of a mistake, they did descend "from 
their stations," on solemn Blomidon, and fell in a slow, 
unpleasant drizzle in the streets of Wolfville and Hor- 
ton. I arrived too early at one of the village churches, 
and while I was waiting for a sexton a door opened, 
and out poured the Sunday school, whose services had 
just ended. On they came, dividing in the centre, and 
falling to the right and left about me, thirty or forty 
boys and girls, between the ages of seven and fifteen 
I looked at them in astonishment. They all had fair 
skins, red cheeks, and clear eyes ; they were all broad- 
shouldered, straight, and sturdy ; the younger ones 
were more than sturdy, — they were fat, from the ankles 
up. But perhaps the most noticeable thing cf all was 
the quiet, sturdy, unharassed expression which their 
faces woje ; a look which is the greatest charm of a 
child's face, but which we rarely see in children over 
two or three years old. Boys of eleven or twelve were 
there, with shoulders broader than the average of our 



1 



CHILDREN IN NOVA SCOTIA. 73 

boys at sixteen, and yet with the pure, childlike look 
on their faces. Girls of ten or eleven were there who 
looked almost like women, — that is, like ideal women, 
— simply because they looked so calm and undis- 
turbed. The Saxon coloring prevailed ; three-fourths 
of the eyes were blue, with hair of that pale ash-brown 
which the French call " blonde ce7idree,^'^ Out of them 
all there was but one child who looked sickly. He had 
evidently met with some accident, and was lame. After- 
ward, as the congregation assembled, I watched the 
fathers and mothers of these children. They, too, 
were broad-shouldered, tall, and straight, especially the 
women. Even old women were straight, like the negroes 
one sees at the South, walking with burdens on their 
heads. 

Five days later I saw in Halifax the celebration of 
the anniversary of the settlement of the province. The 
children of the city and of some of the neighboring 
towns marched in " bands of hope " and processions, 
such as we see in the cities of the States on the Fourth 
of July. This was just the opportunity I wanted. It 
was the same here as in the country. I counted on that 
day just eleven sickly-looking children ; no more ! Such 
brilliant cheeks, such merry eyes, such evident strength , 
it was a scene to kindle the dullest soul. There were 
scores of little ones there, whose droll, fat legs would 
have drawn a crowd in Central Park ; and they all had 
that same, quiet, composed, well-balanced expression 
of countenance of which I spoke before, and of which W 
would be hard to find an instance in all Central Park. 



74 BITS OF TALK. 

Climate undoubtedly has something to do with this. 
The air is moist, and the mercury rarely rises above 
80^ or falls below 10^. Also the comparative quiet of 
their lives helps to make them so beautiful and strong. 
But the most significant fact to my mind is that, until 
the past year, there have been in Nova Scotia no pub- 
lic schools, comparatively few private ones ; and in 
these there is no severe pressure brought to bear on 
the pupils. The private schools have been expensive, 
consequently it has been very unusual for children to 
be sent to school before they were eight or nine years 
of age ; I could not find a person who had ever known 
of a child's being sent to school under seven ! The 
school sessions are on the old plan of six hours per 
day, — from nine till twelve, and from one till four ; but 
no learning of lessons out of school has been allowed. 
Within the last year a system of free public schools 
has been introduced, "and the people are grumbHng 
terribly about it," said my informant. "Why?" I 
asked ; " because they do not wish to have their chil- 
dren educated ? " " Oh, no," said he ; " because they 
do not like to pay the taxes ! " " Alas ! " I thought, 
"if it were only their silver which would be taxed ! " 

I must not be understood to argue from the health 
of the children of Nova Scotia, as contrasted with the 
lack of health among our children, that it is best to 
have no public schools ; only that it is better to have 
10 public schools than to have such public schools as 
are now killing off our children. 

The registration system of Nova Scotia is as yet 



CHILDREN IN NOVA SCOTIA. ^^ 

imperfectly carried out. It is almost impossible to ob- 
tain exact returns from all parts of so thinly settled a 
country. But such statistics as have been already 
established give sufiicient food for reflection in this 
connection. In Massachusetts more than two-fifths of 
all the children born die before they are twelve years 
old. In Nova Scotia the proportion is less than one- 
third. In Nova Scotia one out of every fifty-six lives 
to be over ninety years of ao^e ; and one-twelfth of the 
entire number of deaths is between the ages of eighty 
and ninety. In Massachusetts one person out of one 
hundred and nine lives to be over ninety. 

In Massachusetts the mortality from diseases of the 
brain and nervous system is eleven per cent. In Nova 
Scotia it is onJv eight per cent 



76 BITS OF TALK. 



THE REPUBLIC OF THE FAMILY. 

•' TJE is lover and friend and son, all in one,'' said 
-^ -^ a friend, the other day, telling me of a dear 
boy who, out of his first earnings, had just sent to his 
mother a beautiful gift, costing much more than he 
could really afford for such a purpose. 

That mother is the wisest, sweetest, most triumphant 
mother I have ever known. I am restrained by feel- 
ings of deepest reverence for her from speaking, as I 
might speak, of the rare and tender methods by which 
her motherhood has worked, patiently and alone, for 
nearly twenty years, and made of her two sons " lovers 
and friends." I have always felt that she owed it to 
the world to impart to other mothers all that she could 
of her divine secret ; to write out, even in detail, all 
the processes by which her boys have grown to be so 
strong, upright, loving, and manly. 

But one of her first principles has so direct a bear- 
mg on the subject that I wish to speak of here that I 
venture to attempt an explanation of it. She has told 
me that she never once, even in their childish days, 
took the ground that she had right to require any thing 
from them simply because she was their mother. Thi* 



THE REPUBLIC OF THE FAMILY. 77 

Is a position very startling to the average parent. It is 
exactly counter to traditions. 

"Why must I?" or "Why cannot I?" says the 
child. " Because I say so, and I am your father," has 
been the stern, authoritative reply ever since we can 
any of us remember ; and, I presume, ever since the 
Christian era, since that good Apostle Paul saw enough 
in the Ephesian families where he visited to lead him 
to write to them from Rome, " Fathers, provoke not 
your children to wrath." 

It seems to me that there are few questions of prac- 
tical moment in every-day living on which a foregone 
and erroneous conclusion has been adopted so gener 
ally and so undoubtingly. How it first came about it 
is hard to see. Or, rather, it is easy to see, when one 
reflects ; and the very clearness of the surface expla- 
nation of it only makes its injustice more odious. It 
came about because the parent was strong and the 
child weak. Helplessness in the hands of power, — 
that is the whole story. Suppose for an instant (and, 
absurd as the supposition is practically, it is not logi- 
cally absurd), that the child at six were strong enough 
to whip his father ; let him have the intellect of an in- 
fant, the mistakes and the faults of an infant, — which 
the father would feel himself bound and would be bound 
to correct, — but the body of a man ; and then see in 
how different fashion the father would set himself to 
work to insure good behavior. I never see the heavy, 
impatient hand of a grown man or woman laid with hs 



7^ BITS OF TALK. 

brute force, even for the smallest purpose, on a little 
child, without longing for a sudden miracle to give the 
baby an equal strength to resist. 

When we reahze what it is for us to dare, for our 
own pleasure, even wdth solemnest purpose of the 
noliest of pleasures, parenthood, to bring into exist- 
ence a soul, which must take for our sake its chance of 
joy or sorrow, how monstrous it seems to assume 
that the fact that we have done this thing gives us ar- 
bitrary right to control that soul ; to set our will, as 
will, in place of its will ; to be law unto its life ; to try 
to make of it what it suits our fancy or our con- 
venience to have it ; to claim that it is under obliga- 
tion to us ! 

The truth is, all the obligation, in the outset, is the 
other v/ay. We owe all to them. All that we can do 
to give them happiness, to spare them pain ; all that 
we can do to make them wise and good and safe, — all 
is too little ! All and more than all can never repay 
them for the sweetness, the blessedness, the develop- 
ment that it has been to us to call children ours. If 
we can also so win their love by our loving, so deserve 
their respect by our honorableness, so earn their grati- 
tude by our helpfulness, that they come to be ou^ 
*' .overs and friends," then, ah ! then we have had 
enough of heaven here to make us willing to postpoi>« 
the more for which we hope beyond ! 

But all this comes not of authority, not by command ; 
2II this is perilled always, always impaired, and often 



TEE REPUBLIC OF THE FAMILY. 79 

lost, by authoritative, arbitrary ruling, substitution of 
law and penalty for influence. 

It will be objected by parents who disagree with this 
theory that only authority can prevent license ; that 
without command there will not be control. No one 
has a right to condemn methods he has not tried. \ 
know, for I have seen, I know, for I have myself tested, 
that command and authority are short-lived ; that they 
do not insure the results they aim at ; that real and 
permanent control of a child's behavior, even in little 
things, is gained only by influence, by a slow, sure 
educating, enlightening, and strengthening of a child's 
will. I know, for I have seen, that it is possible in this 
way to make a child only ten years old quite as intelligent 
and trustworthy a free agent as his mother ; to make 
him so sensible, so gentle, so considerate that to say 
" m.ust " or " must not " to him would be as unneces- 
sary and absurd as to say it to her. 

But, if it be wiser and better to surround even little 
children with this atmosphere of freedom, how much 
more essential is it for those who remain under the 
parental roof long after they have ceased to be chil- 
dren ! Just here seems to me to be the fatal rock upon 
which many households make utter shipwreck of their 
peace. Fathers and mothers who have ruled by au- 
thority (let it be as loving as you please, it will still 
remain an arbitrary rule) in the beginning, never seem 
to know when their children are children no longer, 
but have become men and women. In any average 
family, the position of an unmarried daughter after she 



So BITS OF TALK. 

Is twenty years old becomes less and less what it should 
be. In case of sons, the question is rarely a practical 
one ; in those exceptional instances where invalidism 
or some other disability keeps a man helpless for years 
under his father's roof, his very helplessness is at once 
his vindication and his shield, and also prevents his 
feeling manly revolt against the position of unnatural 
childhood. But in the case of daughters it is very dif- 
ferent. Who does not number in his circle of ac- 
quaintance many unmarried women, between the ages 
of thirty and forty, perhaps even older, who have prac- 
tically little more freedom in the ordering of their own 
lives than they had when they were eleven 1 The 
mother or the father continues just as much the 
autocratic centre of the family now as of the nursery, 
thirty years before. Taking into account the chance 
— no, the certainty — of great differences between 
parents and children in matters of temperament and 
taste, it is easy to see that great suffering must result 
from this ; suffering, too, which involves real loss and 
hindrance to growth. It is really a monstrous wrong ; 
but it seems to be rarely observed by the world, and 
never suspected by those who are most responsible for 
it. It is perhaps a question whether the real tyrannies 
in this life are those that are accredited as such. There 
are certainly more than even tyrants know ! 

Every father and mother has it within easy reach to 
become the intimate friend of the child. Closest, 
holiest, sweetest of all friendships is this one, which 
has the closest, holiest tie of blood to underhe the 



1 



THE REPUBLIC OF THE FAMILY. 8l 

bond of soul. We see it in rare cases, proving itself 
divine by rising above even the passion of love be- 
tween man and woman, and carrying men and women 
unwedded to their graves for sake of love of mother oi 
father. When we realize what such friendship is, i 
seems incredible that parents can forego it, or can 
risk losing any shade of its perfectness, for the sake 
of any indulgence of the habit of command or of grati- 
fying of selfish preference. 

In the ideal household of father and mother and 
adult children, the one great aim of the parents ought 
to be to supply, as far as possible to each child, that 
freedom and independence which they have missed 
the opportunity of securing in homes of their own. 
The loss of this one thing alone is a bitterer drop in 
the loneliness of many an unmarried w^oman than 
parents, especially fathers, are apt even to dream, — 
food and clothes and lodgings are so exalted in un- 
thinking estimates. To be without them would be 
distressingly inconvenient, no doubt ; but one can have 
luxurious provision of both and remain very wretched. 
Even the body itself cannot thrive if it has no more 
than these three pottage messes ! Freedom to come, 
go, speak, work, play, — in short, to be one's self, — 
is to the body more than meat and gold, and to the 
soul the wdiole of life. 

Just so far as any parent interferes with this free- 
dom of adult children, even in the little things of a 
single day or a single hour, just so far it is tyranny, 
and the children are wronged. But just so far as 



82 BUS OF TALK. 

parents help, strengthen, and bestow this freedom on 
their children, just so far it is justice and kindness, 
and their relation is cemented into a supreme and un« 
alterable friendship, whose blessedness and whost 
comfort no words can measure. 



THE READY-TO'HALTS. 8a 



THE READY-TO-HALTS. 

Tl,TR. READY-TO-HALT must have been the most 
-*-^-*- exasperating pilgrim that Great Heart ever 
dragged over the road to the Celestial City. Mr. 
Feeble Mind was bad enough ; but genuine weakness 
and organic incapacity appeal all the while to charity 
and sympathy. If people really cannot walk, they 
must be carried. Everybody sees that ; and all stron^ 
people are, or ought to be, ready to lift babies and 
cripples. There are plenty of such in every parish. 
The Feeble Minds are unfortunately predisposed to 
intermarry ; and our schools are overrun with the lit- 
tle Masters and Misses Feeble Mind. But, heavy as 
they are (and they are apt to be fat), they are precious 
and pleasant friends and neighbors in comparison with 
the Ready-to-Halts. 

The Ready-to-Halts are never ready for any thing 
else. They can walk as well as anybody else, if they 
only would ; but they are never quite sure on which 
road they would better go. Great Hearts have to go 
back, and go back, to look them up. They are found 
standing still, helpless and bewildered, on all sorts ci 
absurd side-paths, which lead nowhere ; and they 
never will confess, either, that they need help. The^ 



84 ^^2"^ OF TALK. 

always think they are doing what they call " making 
up their mind.'^ But, whichever way they make it, 
they wish they had made it the other ; so they unmake 
it directly. And by this time the crisis of the first 
hour which they lost has become complicated with that 
of the second hour, for which they are in no wise 
ready ; and so the hours stumble on, one after another, 
and the day is only a tangle of ineffective cross pur- 
poses. Hundreds of such days drift on, with their sad 
burden of wasted time. Year after year their lives fail 
of growth, of delight, of blessing to others. Oppor- 
tunity's great golden doors, which never stay long 
open for any man, have always just closed when 
they reach the threshold of a deed ; and it is hard, 
very hard, to see why it would not have been better 
for them if they had never been born. 

After all, it is not right to be impatient with them ; 
for, in nine cases out of ten, they are no more respon- 
sible for their mental limp than the poor Chinese 
woman is for her feeble feet. From their infancy up 
to what in our comic caricature of words we call " ma- 
turity," they have been bandaged. How should their 
muscles be good for any thing ? From the day when 
we give, and take, and arrange the baby's playthings 
for him, hour by hour, without ever setting before him 
to choose one of two and give up the other, to the day 
when we take it upon ourselves to decide whether he 
shall be an engineer or a lawyer, we persist in doing 
for him the work which he should do for himself. 
This is because we love him more than we love our 



THE READY -2 OH ALTS. 85 

own lives. Oh ! if love could but have its eyes opened 
and sec ! If we were not blind, we should know that 
whenever a child decides for himself deliberately, and 
without bias from others, any question, however small, 
he has had just so many minutes of mental gymnastics, 
— just so much strengthening of the^one faculty on 
whose health and firmness his success in life will de- 
pend more than upon any other thing. 

So many people do not know the difference between 
obstinacy and clear-headed firmness of will, that it is 
hardly safe to say much in praise or blame of either 
without expressly stating that you do not mean the 
other. They are as unlike as digestion and indiges- 
tion, and one would suppose could not be much more 
easily confounded ; but it is constantly done. It has not 
yet ceased to be said among fathers and mothers that 
it is necessary to " break the will " of children ; and it 
has not yet ceased to be seen in the land that men by 
virtue of simple obstinacy are called men of strong 
character. The truth is that the stronger, better 
trained will a man has, the less obstinate he will be. 
Will is of reason ; obstinacy, of temper. What have 
they in common } 

For want of strong will kingdoms and souls have 
been lost. Without it there is no kingdom for any 
man, — no, not even in his own souL It is the one 
attribute of all w^e possess which is most Gcd-Iike. 
By it, we say, under his laws, as he says, enacting 
those laws, " So far and no further." It is not enough 
that we do not "break" this grand power. It shouH 



86 ^ BITS OF TALK, 

be strengthened, developed, trained. And, as the 
good teacher of gymnastics gives his beginners light 
weights to lift and swing, so should we bring to the 
children small points to decide ; to the very little chil- 
dren, very little points. " Will you have the apple, or 
the orange ? You cannot have both. Choose ; but 
after you have chosen you cannot change." "WiL 
you have the horseback ride to-day, or the opera to- 
morrow night ? You can have but one." 

Every day, many times a day, a child should decide 
for himself points involving pros and cons, — substan- 
tial ones too. Let him even decide unwisely, and take 
the consequences ; that too is good for him. No 
amount of Blackstone can give such an idea of law as 
a month of prison. Tell him as much as you please 
of what you know on both sides ; but compel him to 
decide, and also compel him not to be too long about 
it. " Choose ye this day whom ye will serve " is a 
text good for every morning. 

If men and women had in their childhood such 
training of their wills as this, we should not see so 
many putting their hands to the plough and looking 
back, and " not fit for the kingdom of heaven." Nor 
for any kingdom of earth, either, unless it be for the 
wicked little kingdom of the Prince of Monaco, where 
there are but two things to be done, — gamble, oi 
drown yourself 



THE DESCENDANTS OF NABAL. 87 



THE DESCENDANTS OF NABAL. 

'T^HE line has never been broken, and they have 
-*■ married into respectable families, right and left, 
until to-day there can hardly be found a household 
which has not at least one to worry it. 

They are not men and women of great passionate 
natures, who flame out now and then in an outbreak 
like a volcano, from which everybody runs. This, though 
terrible while it lasts, is soon over, and there are great 
compensations in such souls. Their love is worth hav- 
ing. Their tenderness is great. One can forgive them 
" seventy times seven," for the hasty words and actions 
of which they repent immediately with tears. 

But the Nabals are sullen ; they are grumblers ; they 
are never done. Such sons of Belial are they to this 
day that no man can speak peaceably unto them. They 
are as much worse than passionate people as a slow 
drizzle of rain is than a thunder-storm. For the thun- 
der-storm, you stay in-doors, and you cannot help hav- 
ing pleasure in its sharp lights and darks and echoes ; 
and v/hen it is over, what clear air, what a rainbow ! 
But in the drizzle, you go out ; you think that with a 
waterproof, an umbrella, and overshoes, you can man- 



88 BITS OF TALK. 

age to get about in spite of it, and attend to your busi- 
ness. What a state you come home in, — muddy, limp, 
chilled, disheartened ! The house greets you, looking 
also muddy and cold, — for the best of front halls gives 
up in despair and cannot look any thing but forlorn 
in a long, drizzhng rain ; all the windows are bleared 
with trickhng, foggy wet on the outside, which there is 
no wiping off nor seeing through, and if one could see 
through there is no gain. The street is more gloomy 
than the house ; black, slimy mud, inches deep on cross- 
ings ; the same black, slimy mud in footprints on side- 
walks ; hopeless-looking people hurrying by, so unhappy 
by reason of the drizzle that a weird sort of family hke- 
ness is to be seen in all their faces. This is all that 
can be seen outside. It is better not to look. For the 
inside is no redemption except a wood-fire, — a good, 
generous wood-fire, — not in any of the modern com- 
promises called open stoves, but on a broad stone 
hearth, with a big background of chimney, up which 
the sparks can go skipping and creeping. 

This can redeem a drizzle ; but this cannot redeem 
a grumbler. Flump he sits down in the warmth of its 
very blaze, and complains that it snaps, perhaps, or that 
it is oak and maple, when he paid for all hickory. You 
can trust him to put out your wood-fire for you as effect- 
ually as a water-spout. And, if even a wood-fire, bless 
it ! cannot outshine the gloom of his presence, what is 
to happen in the places where there is no wood-fire, on 
the days when real miseries, big and Httle, are on hand, 
to be made into mountains of torture by his grumbling i 



TEE DESCENDANTS 01^ NABAL. 89 

Oh, who can describe him ? There is no language 
which can do justice to him ; no supernatural foresight 
which can predict where his next thrust will fall, from 
what unsuspected corner he will send his next arrow. 
Like death, he has all seasons for his own ; his inge- 
nuity is infernal. Whoever tries to forestall or appease 
him might better be at work in Augean stables ; be- 
cause, after all, we must admit that the facts of life are 
on his side. It is not intended that we shall be very 
comfortable. There is a terrible amount of total de- 
pravity in animate and inanimate things. From morn- 
ing till night there is not an hour without its cross to 
carry. The weather thwarts us ; servants, landlords, 
drivers, washerwomen, and bosom friends misbehave ; 
clothes don't fit ; teeth ache ; stomachs get out of order ; 
newspapers are stupid ; and children make too much 
noise. If there are not big troubles, there are httle 
ones. If they are not in sight, they are hiding. I have 
wondered whether the happiest mortal could point to 
one single moment and say, " At that moment there 
was nothing in my life which I would have had 
changed." I think not. 

In argument, therefore, the grumbler has the best 
of it. It is more than probable that things are as he 
says. But why say it ? Why make four miseries out 
of three ? If the three be already unbearable, so much 
the worse. If he is uncomfortable, it is a pity ; w^e are 
sorry, but v/e cannot change the course of Nature. We 
shall soon have our own little turn of torments, and we 
do not want to be worn out before it comes by having 



90 BITS OF TALK. 

listened to his ; probably, too, the very things of which 
he complains are pressing just as heavily on us as on 
him, — are just as unpleasant to everybody as to him. 
SupiX)se everybody did as he does. Imagine, for in- 
stance, a chorus of grumble from ten people at a break- 
fast-table, all saying at once, or immediately after each 
other, " This coifee is not fit to drink." " Really, the 
attendance in this house is insufferably poor." I have 
sometimes wished to try this homoeopathic treatment 
in a bad case of grumble. It sounds as if it might work 
a cure. 

If you lose your temper with the grumbler, and turn 
upon him suddenly, saying, " Oh, do not spoil all our 
pleasure. Do make the best of things : or, at least, 
keep quiet ! " then how aggrieved he is ! how unjust 
he thinks you are to " make a personal matter of it " ! 
" You do not, surely, suppose I think you are respon- 
sible for it, do you ? " he says, with a lofty air of aston- 
ishment at your unreasonable sensitiveness. Of course, 
we do not suppose he thinks we are to blame ; we do 
not take him to be a fool as well as a grumbler. But 
he speaks to us, at us, before us, about the cause of 
his discomfort, whatever it may be, precisely as he 
would if we were to blame ; and that is one thing which 
makes his grumbling so insufferable. But this he can 
never be made to see. And the worst of it is that 
grumbling is contagious. If we live with him, we shall, 
sooner or later, in spite of our dislike of his ways, fall 
into them; even sinking so low, perhaps, before the 
end of a single summer, as to be heard complaining of 



THE DESCENDANTS OF NAhAL, 91 

butter at boarding-house tables, which is the lowest 
deep of vulgarity of grumbling. There is no help for 
this ; I have seen it again and again. I have caught 
it myself. One grumbler in a family is as pestilent a 
thing as a diseased animal in a herd : if he be not shut 
up o: killed, the herd is lost. 

But the grumbler cannot be shut up or killed, S'nce 
grumbUng is not held to be a proof of insanity, nor a 
capital offence, — more's the pity. 

What, then, is to be done ? Keep out of his way, at 
all costs, if he be grown up. If it be a child, labor day 
and night, as you would with a tendency to paralysis, 
or distortion of limb, to prevent this blight on its life. 

It sounds extreme to say that a child should never 
be allowed to express a dislike of any thing which can- 
not be helped ; but I think it is true. I do not mean 
that it should be positively forbidden or punished, but 
that it should never pass unnoticed ; his attention 
should be invariably called to its uselessness, and to 
the annoyance it gives to other people. Children be- 
gin by being good-natured little grumblers at every 
thing which goes wrong, simply from the outspoken- 
ness of their natures. All they think they say and act. 
The rudiments of good behavior have to be chiefly 
negative at the outset, like Punch's advice to those 
about to marry, — " Don't." 

The race of grumblers would soon die out if all chil- 
dren were so trained that never, between the ages of 
five and twelve, did they utter a needless complaint 
without being gently reminded that it was foolish and 



92 BITS OF TALK. 

disagreeable. How easy for a good-natured and watch 
ful mother to do this ! It takes but a word. 

" Oh, dear ! I wish it had not rained to-day. It is too 
bad I " 

" You do not really mean what you say, my darling. 
It is of much more consequence that the grass should 
grow than that you should go out to play. And it is 
so silly to complain, when we cannot stop its raining.'* 

" Mamma, I hate this pie." 

" Oh ! hush, dear ! Don't say so, if you do. You 
can leave it. You need not eat it. But think how dis- 
agreeable it sounds to hear you say such a thing." 

" Oh, dear ! Oh, dear ! I am too cold." 

" Yes, dear, I know you are. So is mamma. But 
we shall not feel any warmer for saying so. We must 
wait till the fire burns better ; and the time will seem 
twice as long if we grumble." 

" Oh, mamma ! mamma ! My steam-engine is all 
spoiled. It won't run. I hate things that wind up ! " 

" But, my dear little boy, don't grumble so ! What 
would you think if mamma were to say, ' Oh, dear ! oh, 
dear ! My little boy's stockings are full of holes. How 
I hate to mend stockings ! ' and, ' Oh, dear ! oh, dear ! 
My little boy has upset my work-box ! I hate Httle 
boys'?" 

How they look steadily into your eyes for a minute, 
— the honest, reasonable little souls ! — when you say 
such things to them ; and then run off with a laugh, 
lifted up, for that time, by your fitly spoken words of 
help. 



FHE DESCENDANTS UF NABAL. y?, 

Oh ! if the world could only stop long enough for 
one generation of mothers to be made all right, what a 
millennium could be begun in thirty years ! 

" But, mamma, you are grumbling yourself at me 
because I grumbled ! " says a quick-witted darhng not 
ten years old. Ah ! never shall any weak spot in our 
armor escape the keen eyes of these little ones. 

" Yejs^ dear! And I shall grumble at you till I cure 
you of grumbling. Grumblers are the only thing in 
this world that it is right to grumble at." 



94 BITS OF TALK, 



"BOYS NOT ALLOWED/' 

TT was a conspicuous signboard, at least four feet 
-*• long, with large black letters on a white ground : 
" Boys not allowed." I looked at it for some moments 
in a sort of bewildered surprise: I did not quite 
comprehend the meaning of the words. At last I un- 
derstood it. I was waiting in a large railway station, 
where many trains connect ; and most of the passen- 
gers from the train in which I was were eating dinner 
in a hotel near by. I was entirely alone in the car, 
with the exception of one boy, who was perhaps eleven 
years old. I made an involuntary ejaculation as I read 
the words on the sign, and the boy looked around at 
me. 

"Little boy," said I, solemnly, "do you see tliat 
sign ? " 

He turned his head, and, reading the ominous warn- 
ing, nodded sullenly, but said nothing. 

" Boy, what does it mean ? " said I. " Boys must be 
allowed to come into this railway station. There aie 
two now standing in the doorway directly under the 
sign." 

The latent sympathy in my tone touched his heart 



"BOYS NOT ALLOWED." 95 

He left his seat, and, coming to mine, edged in past 
me ; and, putting his head out of the window, read the 
sentence aloud in a contemptuous tone. Then he 
offered me a peanut, which I took ; and he proceeded 
to tell me what he thought of the sign. 

" Boys not allowed ! " said he. " That's just the way 
'tis everywhere ; but I never saw the sign up before. 
It don't make any difference, though, whether they put 
the sign up or not. Why, in New York (you live in 
New York, don't you ? ) they won't even stop the horse- 
cars for a boy to get on. Nobody thinks any thing'U 
hurt a boy ; but they're glad enough to * allow ' us when 
there's any errands to be done, and " — 

"Do you live in New York?" interrupted I ; for I 
did not wish to hear the poor little fellow's list of 
miseries, which I knew by heart beforehand without 
his teUing me, having been hopeless knight-errant of 
oppressed boyhood all my life. 

Yes, he " lived in New York," and he " went to a 
grammar school," and he had "two sisters." And so 
we talked on in that sweet, ready, trustful talk which 
comes naturally only from children's lips, until the 
"twenty minutes for refreshments " were over, and the 
choked and crammed passengers, who had eaten big 
dinners in that breath of time, came hurrying back to 
their seats. Among them came the father and mothei 
of my little friend. In angry surprise at not finding 
him In the seat where they left him, they exclaimed, — 

" Now, where is that boy ? Just like him ! We might 
bave lost every one of these bags." 



90 BITS OF TALK. 

" Here I am, mamma," he called out, pleasantly. " I 
could see the bags all the time. Nobody came into the 
car." 

" I told you not to leave the seat, sir. What do you 
mean by such conduct ? " said the father. 

" Oh, no, papa," said poor Boy, " you only told me 
to take care of the bags." And an anxious look of 
terror came into his face, which told only too well under 
how severe a regime he lived. I interposed hastily 
with — 

" I am afraid I am the cause of your little son's leav- 
ing his seat. He had sat very still till I spoke to him ; 
and I believe I ought to take all the blame." 

The parents were evidently uncultured, shallow 
people. Their irritation with him was merely a sur- 
face vexation, which had no real foundation in a deep 
principle. They became complaisant and smiling at 
my first word, and Boy escaped with a look of great 
relief to another seat, where they gave him a simple lun- 
cheon of saleratus gingerbread. " Boys not allowed " 
to go in to dinner at the Massasoit, thought I to my- 
self; and upon that text I sat sadly meditating all the 
way from Springfield to Boston. 

How true it was, as the little fellow had said, that 
"it don't make any difference whether they put the 
sign up or not ! " No one can watch carefully any 
average household where there are boys, and not see 
that there are a thousand little ways in which the boys' 
comfort, freedom, preference will be disregarded, when 
the girls' will be considered. This is partly intentional, 



"BOYS NOT allowed:* 97 

partly unconscious. Something is to be said undoubt- 
edly on the advantage of making the boy realize early 
and keenly that manhood is to bear and to work, and 
womanhood is to be helped and sheltered. But this 
sliould be inculcated, not inflicted ; asked, not seized ; 
sliown and explained, not commanded. Nothing can 
be surer than the growth in a boy of tender, chivalrous 
regard for his sisters and for all women, if the seeds 
of it be rightly sown and gently nurtured. But the 
common method is quite other than this. It begins 
too harshly and at once with assertion or assump- 
tion. 

" Mother never thinks I am of any consequence," 
said a dear boy to me, the other day. " She's all for 
the girls." 

This was not true ; but there was truth in it And 
I am very sure that the selfishness, the lack of real 
courtesy, which we see so plainly and pitiably in the 
behavior of the average young man to-day is the slow, 
certain result of years of just such feelings as this child 
expressed. The boy has to scramble for his rights. 
Naturally he is too busy to think much about the rights 
of others. The man keeps up the habit, and is nega- 
tively selfish without knowing it. 

Take, for instance, the one point of the minor cour- 
tesies (if we can dare to call any courtesies minor) of 
daily intercourse. How many people are there who 
habitually speak to a boy of ten, twelve, or fourteen 
with the same civility as to his sister, a little youngei 
or older ? 

7 - 



98 BITS OF TALK. 

" I like Miss ," said this same dear boy to me, 

one day ; " for she always bids me good-morning." 

Ah ! never is one such word thrown away on a lov- 
ing, open-hearted boy. Men know that safe through 
all the wear and tear of life they keep far greener the 
memory of some woman or some man who was kind 
to them in their boyhood than of the friend who helped 
or cheered them yesterday. 

Dear, blessed, noisy, rolHcking, tormenting, comfort^ 
ing Boy ! What should we do without him ? How 
much we like, without suspecting it, his breezy pres- 
ence in the house ! Except for him, how would errands 
be done, chairs brought, nails driven, cows stoned out 
of our way, letters carried, twine and knives kept ready, 
lost things found, luncheon carried to picnics, three- 
year-olds that cry led out of meeting, butterflies and 
birds' nests and birch-bark got, the horse taken round 
to the stable, borrowed things sent home, — and all 
with no charge for time ? 

Dear, patient, busy Boy ! Shall we not sometimes 
answer his questions ? Give him a comfortable seat ? 
Wait and not reprove him till after the company has 
gone ? Let him wear his best jacket, and buy him half 
as many neckties as his sister has ? Give him some 
honey, even if there is not enough to go round ? Lis- 
ten tolerantly to his little bragging, and help him 
^* do " his sums ? 

With a sudden shrill scream the engine slipped off 
on a side-track, and the cars glided into the great, grim 
city-station, looking all the grimmer for its twinkling 



*'BOYS NOT ALLOWED." 99 

b'ghts. The masses of people who were waiting and 
the masses of people who had come surged toward each 
other like two great waves, and mingled in a moment 
I caught sight of my poor little friend, Boy, following 
his father, struggling along in the crowd, carrying two 
heavy carpet-bags, a strapped bundle, and two um- 
brellas, and being sharply told to "Keep up close 
there." 

" Ha ! " said I^ savagely, to myself, "doing porters 
work is not one of the things which * boys * are * not 
aUowed.'" 

LofC. 



f» BITS OF TALK. 



HALF AN HOUR IN A RAILWAY 
STATION. 

FT was one of those bleak and rainy days which 
mark the coming of spring on New England sea- 
shores. The rain felt and looked as if it might at any 
minute become hail or snow ; the air pricked like 
needles when it blew against flesh. Yet the huge 
railway station was as full of people as ever. One 
could see no difference between this dreariest of days 
and the sunniest, so far as the crowd was concerned, 
except that fewer of the people wore fine clothes ; per- 
haps, also, that their faces looked a little more sombre 
and weary than usual. 

There is no place in the world where human nature 
shows to such sad disadvantage as in waiting-rooms 
at railway stations, especially in the " Ladies' Room." 
In the "Gentlemen's Room'' there is less of that 
ghastly, apathetic silence which seems only explain- 
able as an interval between two terrible catastrophes. 
Shall we go so far as to confess that even the un- 
sightly spittoons, and the uncleanly and loquacious 
fellowship resulting from their common use, seem 
here, for the moment, redeemed from a little of theif 



IN A RAILWAY STATION. lOl 

abominableness, — simply because almost any action 
is better tlian utter inaction, and any thing which makes 
the joyless, taciturn American speak to his fellow 
whom he does not know, is for the time being a bless- 
ing. But in the " Ladies Room " there is not even a 
community of interest in a single bad habit, to break 
the monotone of weary stillness. Who has not felt 
the very soul writhe within her as she has first crossed 
the threshold of one of these dismal antechambers of 
journey ? Carpetless, dingy, dusty ; two or three low 
sarcophagi of greenish-gray iron in open spaces, sur- 
rounded by blue-lipped women, in different angles and 
attitudes of awkwardness, trying to keep the soles of 
their feet in a perpendicular position, to be warmed at 
what they have been led to beheve is a steam-heating 
apparatus ; a few more women, equally listless and 
weary-looking, standing in equally difficult and awk- 
ward positions before a counter, holdmg pie in one 
hand, and tea in a cup and saucer in the other, taking 
alternate mouthfuls of each, and spilling both ; the 
rest wedged bolt upright against the wall in narrow 
partitioned seats, which only need a length of perfo- 
rated foot-board in front to make them fit to be patented 
as the best method of putting whole communities of 
citizens into the stocks at once. All, feet warmers, 
pie-eaters, and those who sit in the red-velvet stocks, 
wear so exacdy the same expression of vacuity and 
fatigue that they might almost be taken for one gigan- 
tic and unhappy family connection, on its way to what 
is called in newspapers "a sad event." The only 



102 BITS OF TALK, 

wonder is that this stiffened, desiccated crowd retains 
vitahty enough to remember the hours at which its 
several trains depart, and to rise up and shake itsell 
aHve and go on board. One is haunted sometimes b) 
the fancy that some day, when the air in the room is 
unusually bad and the trains are delayed, a curious 
phenomenon will be seen. The petrifaction will be 
carried a little farther than usual, and, when the beU 
rings and the official calls out, " Train made up for 
Babel, Hinnom, and way stations ? " no women will 
come forth from the " Ladies^ Room," no eye will move, 
no muscle will stir. Husbands and brothers will wait 
and search vainly for those who should have met them 
at the station, with bundles of the day's shopping to 
be carried out ; homes will be desolate ; and the his- 
tory of rare fossils and petrifactions will have a novel 
addition. Or, again, that, if some sudden convulsion 
of Nature, like those which before now have buried 
wicked cities and the dwellers in them, were to-day 
to swallow up the great city of New Sodom in America, 
and keep it under ground for a few thousand years, 
nothing in all its circuit would so puzzle the learned 
archaeologists of a. d. 5873 as the position of the 
skeletons in these same waiting-rooms of railway sta- 
tions. 

Thinking such thoughts as these, sinking sk)wly 
and surely to the level of the place, I waited, on this 
bleak, rainy day, in just such a " Ladies' Room " as I 
have described. I sat in the red- velvet stocks, with 
my eyes fixed on the floor. 



IN A RAILWAY STATION, 103 

" Please, ma'am, won't you buy a basket ? " said a 
cheery little voice. So near me, without my knowing 
it, had the Httle tradesman come that I was as startled 
as if the voice had spoken out of the air just above my 
head. 

He was a sturdy little fellow, ten years old, Irish, 
dirty, ragged ; but he had honest, kind gray eyes, and 
a smile which ought to have sold more baskets than 
he could carry. A few kind words unsealed the foun- 
tain of his childish confidences. There were four 
children younger than he ; the mother took in washing, 
and the father, who was a cripple from rheumatism, 
made these baskets, which he carried about to sell. 

" Where do you sell the most ? " 

" Round the depots. That's the best place." 

" But the baskets are rather clumsy to carry. Al- 
most everybody has his hands full, when he sets out 
on a journey." 

" Yis'm ; but mostly they doesn't take the baskets. 
But they gives me a little change," said he, with a 
smile, half roguish, half sad. 

I watched him on in his pathetic pilgrimage round 
that dreary room, seeking help from that dreary circle 
of women. 

My heart aches to write down here the true record 
that oui of those scores of women only three even 
smiled or spoke to the little fellow. Only one gave 
him money. My own sympathies had been so won by 
his face and manner that I found myself growing hot 
with resentment as I watched woman after woman 



104 BITS Oj^ talk. 

wave him off with indifferent or impatient gesture* 
His face was a face which no mother ought to have 
been able to see without a thrill of pity and affection. 
God forgive me ! As if any mother ought to be able 
to see any child, ragged, dirty, poor, seeking help 
and finding none ! But his face was so honest, and 
brave, and responsive that it added much to the appeal 
of his poverty. 

One woman, young and pretty, came into the room, 
bringing in her arms a large toy horse, and a little 
violin. " Oh," I said to myself, "she has a boy of 
her own, for whom she can buy gifts freely. She will 
surely give this poor child a penny." He thought so, 
too ; for he went toward her with a more confident 
manner than he had shown to some of the others. 
No ! She brushed by him impatiently, without a 
word, and walked to the ticket-office. He stood look- 
ing at the violin and the toy horse till she came back 
to her seat. Then he lifted his eyes to her face again ; 
but she apparently did not see him, and he went away. 
Ah, she is only half mother who does not see her own 
child in every child ! — her own child's grief in every 
pain which makes another child weep ! 

Presently the little basket-boy went out into the great 
hall. I watched him threading his way in and out 
among the groups of men. I saw one man — bless 
him ! — pat the httle fellow on the head; then I lost 
sight of him. 

After ten minutes he came back into the Ladies* 
Room, with only one basket in his hand, and a \&ty 



IN A RAILWAY STATION, 105 

happy little face. The "sterner sex" had been kinder 
to him than we. The smile which he gave me in an- 
swer to my glad recognition of his good luck was the 
sunniest sunbeam I have seen on a human face for 
many a day. He sank down into the red- velvet stocks^ 
and twirled his remaining basket, and swung his shabby 
little feet, as idle and unconcerned as if he were some 
rich man's son, waiting for the train to take him home. 
So much does a httle lift help the heart of a child, even 
of a beggar child. It is a comfort to remember him, 
with that look on his face, instead of the wistful, plead- 
ing one which I saw at first. I left him lying back on 
the dusty velvet, which no doubt seemed to him un- 
questionable splendor. In the cars I sat just behind 
the woman with the toy-horse and the violin. I saw 
her glance rest lovingly on them many times, as she 
thought of her boy at home ; and I wondered if the 
little basket-seller had really produced no impression 
whatever on her heart. I shall remember him long after 
(if he lives) he is a man ! 



io6 BTTS OF TALK. 



A GENIUS FOR AFFECTION. 

'T^HE other day, speaking superficially and unchar- 
■*• itably, I said of a woman, whom I knew but 
slightly, " She disappoints me utterly. How could her 
husband have married her ? She is commonplace and 
stupid." 

"Yes," said my friend, reflectively ; "it is strange. 
She is not a brilliant woman ; she is not even an in- 
tellectual one ; but there is such a thing as a genius 
for affection, and she has it. It has been good for her 
husband that he married her." 

The words sank into my heart like a great spiritual 
plummet. They dropped down to depths not often 
stirred. And from those depths came up some shining 
sands of truth, worth keeping among treasures ; hav- 
ing a phosphorescent light in them, which can shine in 
dark places, and, mab'ng them light as day, reveal their 
beauty. 

" A genius for affection." Yes ; there is such a thing, 
and no other genius is so great. The phrase means 
something more than a capacity, or even a talent for 
loving. That is common to all human beings, more or 
less. A man or woman without it would be a monster, 
<uch as has probal^ly never been on the earth. AH 



A GENIUS FOR AFFECTION. 107 

men and women, whatever be their shortcomings in 
other directions, have this impulse, this faculty, in a 
degree. It takes shape in family ties : makes clumsy 
and unfortunate work of them in perhaps two cases 
out of three, — wives tormenting husbands, husbands 
neglecting and humiUating wives, parents maltreating 
and ruining children, children disobeying and grieving 
parents, and brothers and sisters quarrelling to the 
point of proverbial mention ; but under all this, in 
spite of all this, the love is there. A great trouble or 
a sudden emergency will bring it out. In any common 
danger, hands clasp closely and quarrels are forgotten ; 
over a sick-bed hard ways soften into yearning tender- 
ness ; and by a grave, alas ! what hot tears fall ! The 
poor, imperfect love which had let itself be wearied 
and harassed by the frictions of life, or hindered and 
warped by a body full of diseased nerves, comes run- 
ning, too late, with its effort to make up lost oppor- 
tunities. It has been all the while alive, but in a sort 
of trance ; little good has come of it, but it is something 
that it was there. It is the divine germ of a flower and 
fruit too precious to mature in the first years after 
grafting ; in other soils, by other waters, when the 
healing of the nations is fulfilled, we shall see its per- 
fection. Oh ! what atonement will be there ! What 
allowances we shall make for each other, then ! with 
«rhat love we shall love ! 

But the souls who have what my friend meant by a 
** genius for affection " are in another atmosphere than 
^at which common men breathe. Their " upper air ' 



lo8 BITS OF TALK. 

is clearer, more rarefied than any to wLicn mere intel- 
lectual genius can soar. Because, to this last, always 
remain higher heights which it cannot grasp, see, r»or 
comprehend. 

Michel Angelo may build his dome of marble, and 
human intellect may see as clearly as if God had said 
it that no other dome can ever be built so grand, so 
beautiful. But above St. Peter's hangs the blue tent- 
dome of the sky, vaster, rounder, elastic, unfathomable, 
making St. Peter's look small as a drinking-cup, shut- 
ting it soon out of sight to north, east, south, and west, 
by the mysterious horizon-fold which no man can hft. 
And beyond this horizon-fold of our sky shut dowu 
again other domes, which the wisest astronomer may 
not measure, in whose distances our little ball and we, 
with all our spinning, can hardly show hke a star. If 
St. Peter's were swallov/ed up to-morrow, it would make 
no real odds to anybody but the Pope. The probabil- 
ities are that Michel Angelo himself has forgotten all 
about it. 

Titian and Raphael, and all the great brotherhood 
of painters, may kneel re\ erently as priests before Na- 
ture's face, and paint pictures at sight of which all 
men's eyes shall fill with grateful tears ; and yet all 
men shall go away, and find that the green shade of a 
tree, the light on a young girl's face, the sleep of a child, 
the flowering of a flower, are to their pictures as living 
life to beautiful death. 

Coming to Art's two highest spheres, — music of 
sound and music of speech, — we find that Beethoven 



A GENIUS FOR AFFECTION, 109 

and Mozart, and Milton and Shakespeare, have written. 
But the symphony is sacred only because, and only so 
far as, it renders the joy or the sorrow which we have 
felt. Surely, the interpretation is less than the thing 
interpreted. Face to face with a joy, a sorrow, would 
a symphony avail us ? And, as for words, who shall 
express their feebleness in midst of strength ? The 
fettered helplessness in spite of which they soar to such 
heights .'* The most perfect sentence ever written bears 
to the thing it meant to say the relation which the 
chemist's formula does to the thing he handles, names, 
analyzes, can destroy, perhaps, but cannot make. Every 
element in the crystal, the liquid, can be weighed, as- 
signed, and rightly called ; nothing in all science is 
more wonderful than an exact chemical formula ; but, 
after all is done, will remain for ever unknown the one 
subtle secret, the vital centre of the whole. 

But the souls who have a "genius for affection" 
have no outer dome, no higher and more vital beauty ; 
no subtle secret of creative motive force to elude their 
grasp, mock their endeavor, overshadow their lives. 
The subtlest essence of the thing they worship and 
desire, they have in their own nature, — they are. No 
schools, no standards, no laws can help or hinder 
them. 

To them the world is as if it were not. Work and 
pain and loss are as if they were not. These are they 
10 whom it is easy to die any death, if good can come 
that way to one they love. These are they who do die 
daily unnoted on our right hand and on our left,— 



no BITS OF TALK, 

fathers and mothers for children, husbands and wives 
for each other. These are they, also, who live, — which 
is often far harder than it is to die, — long lives, into 
whose being never enters one thought of self from the 
rising to the going down of the sun. Year builds on 
year with unvarying steadfastness the divine temple 
of their beauty and their sacrifice. They create, like 
God. The universe which science sees, studies, and 
explains, is small, is petty, beside the one which grows 
under their spiritual touch ; for love begets love. The 
waves of eternity itself ripple out in immortal circles 
under the ceaseless dropping of their crystal deeds. 

Angels desire to look, but cannot, into the mystery 
of holiness and beauty which such human lives reveaL 
Only God can see them clearly. God is their nearest 
of kin ; for He is love. 



RAINY DAYS. Ill 



RAINY DAYS. 

TT 7ITH what subtle and assured tyranny they take 
^ ^ possession of the world ! Stoutest hearts are 
made subject, plans of conquerors set aside, — the 
heavens and the earth and man, — all ahke at the mercy 
of the rain. Come when they may, wait long as they 
will, give what warnings they can, rainy days are always 
interruptions. No human being has planned for them 
then and there. " If it had been but yesterday," " If 
it were only to-morrow," is the cry from all lips. Ah ! 
a lucky tyranny for us is theirs. Were the clouds sub- 
ject to mortal call or prohibition, the seasons would 
fail and death get upper hand of all things before men 
agreed on an hour of common convenience. 

What tests they are of people's souls ! Show me a doz- 
en men and women in the early morning of a rainy day, 
and I will tell by their words and their faces who among 
them is rich and who is poor, — who has much goods laid 
up for just such times of want, and who has been spend- 
thrift and foolish. That curious, shrewd, underlying 
instinct, common to all ages, which takes shape in 
proverbs recognized this long ago. Who knows when 
it was first said of 2 man laying up money, " He lays by 



112 BITS OF TALK. 

for a rainy day " ? How close the parallel is between the 
man who, having spent on each day's living the whole 
of each day's income, finds himself helpless in an emer- 
gency of sickness whose expenses he has no money 
to meet, and the man who, having no intellectual re- 
sources, no self-rehant habit of occupation, finds him- 
self shut up in the house idle and wretched for a rainy 
day. I confess that on rainy mornings in country 
houses, among well-dressed and so-called intelligent 
and Christian people, I have been seized with stronger 
disgusts and despairs about the capacity and worth of 
the average human creature, than I have ever felt in the 
worst haunts of ignorant wickedness. 

"What is there to do to-day?" is the question they 
ask. I know they are about to ask it before they speak. 
I have seen it in their listless and disconcerted eyes at 
breakfast. It is worse to me than the tolling of a bell ; 
for saddest dead of all are they who have only a 
"name to live." 

The truth is, there is more to do on a rainy day than 
on any other. In addition to all the sweet, needful, 
possible business of living and working, and learning 
and helping, which is for all days, there is the beauty 
of the rainy day to see, the music of the rainy day to 
hear. It drums on the window-panes, chuckles and 
gurgles at corners of houses, tinkles in spouts, makes 
mysterious crescendoes and arpeggio chords through 
the air ; and all the while drops firom the eaves and 
upper window-ledges are beating time as rhythmical 
and measured as that of a metronome, — time to which 



RAINY DAYS, II3 

our own souls furnish tune, sweet or sorrowful, in- 
spiriting or saddening, as we will. It is a curious 
experiment to try repeating or chanting lines in time 
and cadence following the patter of raindrops on win- 
dows. It will sometimes be startHng in its effect : no 
metre, no accent fails of its response in the low, liquid 
stroke of the tender drops, — there seems an uncanny 
rapport between them at once. 

And the beauty of the rain, not even love can find 
words to tell it. If it left but one trace, the exquisite 
shifting sheen of pearls on the outer side of the win- 
dow glass, that alone one might watch for a day. In 
all times it has been thought worthy of kings, of them 
who are royally rich, to have garments sown thick in 
dainty lines and shapes with fine seed pearls. Who 
ever saw any such embroidery which could compare 
with the beauty of one pane of glass wrought on a 
single side with the shining white transparent globu- 
lets of rain ? They are millions ; they crowd ; they 
blend j they become a silver stream ; they glide slowly 
down, leaving tiniest silver threads behind ; they make 
of tliemselves a silver bank of miniature sea at the 
bottom of the pane; and, while they do this, other 
millions are set pearl-wise at the top, to crowd, blend, 
glide down in their turn, and overflow the miniature 
sea. This is one pane, a few inches square ; and rooms 
have many windows of many panes. And looking past 
tliis spectacle, out of our windows, how is it that we dc 
not each rainy day weep with pleasure at sight of the 
glistening show ? Every green thing, from tiniest grass* 
8 



114 BITS OF TALK 

blade lying lowest, to highest waving tips o: eimh, aisu 
set thick with the water-pearls ; all tossing and catch- 
ing, and tossing and catching, in fairy game with the 
wind, and with the rain itself, always losing, always 
gaining, changing shape and place and number every 
moment, till the twinkling and shifting dazzle all eyes. 

Then at the end comes the sun, like a magician for 
whom all had been made ready ; at sunset, perhaps, or 
at sunrise, if the storm has lasted all night. In one 
instant the silver balls begin to disappear. By count- 
less thousands at a time he tosses them back v/hence 
they came ; but as they go, he changes them, under our 
eyes, into prismatic globes, holding very hght of very 
light in their tiny circles, shredding and sorting it into 
blazing lines of rainbow color. 

All the Httle children shout with dehght, seeing these 
things ; and call dull, grown-up people to behold. They 
reply, " Yes, the storm is over ; " and this is all it means 
to most of them. This kingdom of heaven they can- 
not enter, not being "as a little child." 

It would be worth while to know, if we only could, 
just what our betters — the birds and insects and 
beasts — do on rainy days. But we cannot find out 
much. It would be a great thing to look inside of an 
ant-hill in a long rain. All we know is that the doors 
are shut tight, and a few sentinels, who look as if 
India-rubber coats would be welcome, stand outside. 
The stillness and look of intermission in the woods on 
a really rainy day is something worth getting wet to 
observe. It is like Sunday in London, or Fourth of 



RAINY DAYS. 115 

July in a country town which has gone bodily to a 
• picnic in the next village. The strays who are out 
seem like accidentally arrived people, who have lost 
their way. One cannot fancy a caterpillar's being 
otherwise than very uncomfortable in wet haii ; and 
what can there be for butterflies and dragon-flies to do, 
in the close corners into which they creep, with wings 
shut up as tight as an umbrella ? The beasts fare 
better, being clothed in hides. Those whom we often- 
est see out in rains (cows and oxen and horses) keep 
straight on with their perpetual munching, as content 
wet as dry, though occasionally we see them ac- 
cept the partial shelter of a tree from a particularly 
hard shower. 

Hens are the forlornest of all created animals when 
it rains. Who can help laughing at sight of a flock of 
them huddled up under lee of a barn, limp, draggled, 
spiritless, shifting from one leg to the other, with their 
silly heads hanging inert to right or left, looking as 
if they would die for want of a yawn ? One sees 
just such groups of other two-legged creatures in 
parlors, under similar circumstances. The truth is, a 
hen's life at best seems poorer than that of any other 
known animal. Except when she is setting, I cannot 
help having a contempt for her. This also has been 
recognized by that common instinct of people which 
goes to the making of proverbs ; for " Hen's time ain't 
worth much " is a common saying among farmers' 
wives. How she dawdles about all day, with her eyes 
not an inch from the ground, forever scratching and 



ii6 BITS OF TALK. 

feeding in dirtiest places, — a sort of animated muck- 
rake, with a mouth and an alimentary canal ! No won- 
der such an inane creature is wretched when it rains, 
and her soulless business is interrupted. She is, I 
think, likest of all to the human beings, men or women, 
who do not know what to do with themselves on lainy 
days 



11 



FRIENDS OF THE PRISONERS. 117 



FRIENDS OF THE PRISONERS. 

TN many of the Paris prisons is to be seen a long, 
•*■ dreary room, through the middle of which are built 
two high waUs of iron grating, enclosing a space of 
some three feet in width. 

A stranger visiting the prison for the first time 
would find it hard to divine for what purpose these 
walls of grating had been built. But on the appointed 
days when the friends of the prisoners are allowed to 
enter the prison, their use is sadly evident It would 
not be safe to permit wives and husbands, and moth- 
ers and sons, to clasp hands in unrestrained freedom. 
A tiny file, a skein of silk, can open prison-doors and 
set captives free ; . love's ingenuity will circumvent 
tyranny and fetters, in spite of all possible precautions. 
Therefore the vigilant authority says, " You may see, 
but not touch ; there shall be no possible opportunity 
for an instrument of escape to be given ; at more than 
arm's length the wife, the mother must be held." The 
prisoners are led in and seated on a bench upon cne 
side of these gratings ; the friends are led in and 
seated on a similar bench on the other side ; jailers 
are in attendance in both rooms ; no words can be 



klS BITS OF TALK. 

spoken which the jailers do not hear. Yearningly 
eyes meet eyes ; faces are pressed against the hard 
wires ; loving words are exchanged ; the poor prisoned 
souls ask eagerly for news from the outer world, — 
the world from which they are as much hidden as if 
they were dead. Fathers hear how the little ones have 
grown ; sometimes, alas ! how the little ones have 
died. Small gifts of fruit or clothing are brought ; but 
must be given first into the hands of the jailers. Even 
flowers cannot be given from loving hand to hand ; 
for in the tiniest flower might be hidden the secret 
poison which would give to the weary prisoner surest 
escape of all. All day comes and goes the sad train of 
friends ; lingering and turning back after there is no 
more to be said ; weeping when they meant and tried 
to smile ; more hungry for closer sight and voice, and 
for touch, with every moment that they gaze through 
the bars ; and going away, at last, with a new sense of 
loss and separation, which time, with its merciful heal- 
ing, will hardly soften before the visiting-day will come 
again, and the same heart-rending experience of 
mingled torture and joy will again be borne. But to 
the prisoners these glimpses of friends' faces are like 
manna from heaven. Their whole life, physical and 
mental, receives a new impetus from them. Their 
blood flows more quickly, their eyes light up, they 
live from one day to the next on a memory and a hope. 
No punishment can be invented so terrible as the 
deprivation of the sight of their friends on the visiting- 
day. Men who are obstinate and immovable before 



FRIENDS OF THE PRISONERS. 1 19 

any sort or amount of physical torture are subdued by 
mere threat of this. 

A friend who told me of a visit he paid to the Prison 
Mazas, on one of the days, said, with tears in his 
eyes, " It was almost more than I could bear to see 
tliese poor souls reaching out toward each other from 
either side of the iron railings. Here a poor, old 
woman, tottering and weak, bringing a Httle fruit in a 
basket for her son ; here a wife, holding up a baby to 
look through the gratings at its father, and the father 
trying in an agony of earnestness to be sure that the 
baby knew him ; here a little girl, looking half re- 
proachfully at her brother, terror struggling with ten- 
derness in her young face ; on the side of the friends, 
love and yearning and pity beyond all words to de- 
scribe ; on the side of the prisoners, love and yearning 
just as great, but with a misery of shame added, which 
gave to many faces a look of attempt at dogged indif- 
ference on the surface, constantly betrayed and con- 
tradicted, however, by the flashing of the eyes and the 
red of the cheeks." 

The story so impressed me that I could not for days 
lose sight of the picture it raised ; the double walls of 
iron grating ; the cruel, inexorable, empty space be- 
tween them, — empty, yet crowded with words and 
looks ; the lines of anxious, yearning faces on either 
side. But presently I said to myself. It is, after all, 
not so unlike the life we all live. Who of us is not in 
prison ? Who of us is not living out his time of pun- 
ishment ? Law holds us all in its merciless fulfilment 



i20 BITS OF TALK, 

of penalty for sin ; disease, danger, work separate us 
wall us, bury us. That we are not numbered with the 
number of a cell, clothed in the uniform of a prison, 
locked up at night, and counted in the morning, is only 
an apparent difference, and not so real a one. Our 
jailers do not know us ; but we know them. There 
is no fixed day gleaming for us in the future when 
our term of sentence will expire and we shall regain 
freedom. It may be to-morrow ; but it may be three- 
score years away. Meantime, we bear ourselves as if 
we were not in prison. We profess that we choose, 
we keep our fetters out of sight, we smile, we sing, we 
contrive to be glad of being ahve, and we take great 
interest in the changing of our jails. But no man 
knows where his neighbor's prison lies. How bravely 
and cheerily most eyes look up ! This is one of the 
sweetest mercies of life, that " the heart knoweth its 
own bitterness,'* and, knowing it, can hide it. Hence, 
we can aU be friends for other prisoners, standing 
separated from them by the impassable iron gratings 
and the fixed gulf of space, which are not inappropri- 
ate emblems of the unseen barriers between all human 
souls. We can show kindly faces, speak kindly words, 
bear to them fruits and food, and moral help, greater 
than fruit or food. We need not aim at philanthro- 
pies ; we need not have a visiting-day, nor seek a 
prison-house built of stone. On every road each man 
we meet is a prisoner ; he is dying at heart, however 
sound he looks ; he is only waiting, however well he 
works. If we stop to ask whether he be our brother, 



FRIENDS OF TEE PRISONERS, X2I 

he is gone. Our one smile would have lit up his 
prison-day. Alas for us if we smiled not as we 
passed by ! Alas for us if, face to face, at last, with 
our Elder Brother, we find ourselves saying, " Lord, 
when saw we thee sick and in prison ! " 



122 BITS OF TALK. 



A COMPANION FOR THE WINTER. 

T HAVE engaged a companion for the winter. It 
•^ would be simply a superfluous egotism to say this to 
the pubHc, except that I have a philanthropic motive 
for doing so. There are many lonely people who are 
in need of a companion possessing just such qualities 
as his ; and he has brothers singularly like himself, 
whose services can be secured. I despair of doing 
justice to him by any description. In fact, thus far, 
I discover new perfections in him daily, and believe 
that I am yet only on the threshold of our friendship. 

In conversation he is more suggestive than any per- 
son 1 have ever known. After two or three hours alone 
with him, I am sometimes almost startled to look back 
and see through what a marvellous train of fancy and 
reflection he has led me. Yet he is never wordy, and 
often conveys his subtlest meaning by a look. 

He is an artist, too, of the rarest sort. You watch 
the process under which his pictures grow with in- 
credulous wonder. The Eastern magic which drops 
the seed in the mould, and bids it shoot up before your 
eyes, blossom, and bear its fruit in an hour, is tardy 
and clumsy by side of the creative genius of my com- 
panion. His touch is swift as air ; his coloring is vivid 



A COMPANION FOR THE WINTER. 123 

as light ; he has learned, I know not how, the secrets of 
hidden places -n all lands ; and he paints, now a tufted 
clump of soft ,ocoa palms ; now the spires and walls 
of an iceberg, glittering in yellow sunlight ; now a des- 
olate, sandy waste, where black rocks and a few crum- 
bling ruins are lit up by a lurid glow ; then a cathedral 
front, with carvings like lace ; then the skeleton of a 
wrecked ship, with bare ribs and broken masts, — and 
all so exact, so minute, so life-Hke, that you believe no 
man could paint thus any thing which he had not seen. 
He has a special love for mosaics, and a marvellous 
facult}'- for making drawings of curious old patterns. 
Nothing is too complicated for his memory, and he 
revels in the most fantastic and intricate shapes. I 
have known him in a single evening throw oflf a score 
of designs, all beautiful, and many of them rare : fiery 
scorpions on a black ground ; pale lavender filagrees 
over scarlet ; white and black squares blocked out as 
for tiles of a pavement, and crimson and yellow threads 
interlaced over them ; odd Chinese patterns in brilliant 
colors, all angles and surprises, witn no likeness to 
any thing in nature ; and exquisite little bits of land- 
scape in soft grays and whites. Last night was one 
of his nights of reminiscences of the mosaic-workers. 
A fiirious snow-storm was raging, and, as the flaky 
crystals piled up in drifts on the window-ledges, he 
seemed to catch the inspiration of their law of struc- 
ture, and drew sheet after sheet of crystalline shapes ; 
some so delicate and filmy that it seemed as if a jar 
might obliterate them ; some massive ^,id strong, like 



124 ^ITS OF TALK. 

those in which the earth keeps her mineral treasures ; 
then, at last, on a round charcoal disk, he traced out a 
perfect rose, in a fragrant white powder, which piled 
up under his fingers, petal after petal, circle after circle, 
till the feathery stamens were buried out of sight. Then, 
as we held our breath for fear of disturbing it, with a 
good-natured little chuckle, he shook it off into the fire, 
and by a few quick strokes of red turned the black char- 
coal disk into a shield gay enough for a tournament. 

He has talent for modelling, but this he exercises 
more rarely. Usually, his figures are grotesque rather 
than beautiful, and he never allows them to remain 
longer than for a few moments, often changing them so 
rapidly under your eye that it seems like jugglery. He 
is fondest of doing this at twilight, and loves the dark- 
est corner of the room. From the half-light he will 
suddenly thrust out before you a grinning gargoyle 
head, to which he will give in an instant more a 
pair of spider legs, and then, with one roll, stretch it 
out into a crocodile, whose jaws seem so near snap- 
ping that you involuntarily draw your chair further 
back. Next, in a freak of ventriloquism, he startles 
you still more by bringing from the crocodile's mouth 
a sigh, so long drawn, so human, that you really shud- 
der, and are ready to implore him to play no more 
tricks. He knows when he has reached this Tmit, 
and soothes you at once by a tender, far-off whisper, 
like the wind through pines, sometimes almost like an 
iEohan harp ; then he rouses you from your dreams by 
what you are sure is a tap at the door. You turn, SDeak, 



i 



A COMPANION FOR THE WINTER. 125 

listen ; no one enters ; the tap again. Ah ! it is only a 
little more of the ventriloquism of this wonderful creat- 
ure. You are alone with him, and there was no tap at 
the door. 

But when there is, and the friend comes in, then my 
com.panion's genius shines out. Almost always in life 
the third person is a discord, or at least a burden ; but 
he is so genial, so diffusive, so sympathetic, that, like 
some tints by which painters know how to bring out 
all the other colors in a picture, he forces every one to 
do his best. I am indebted to him already for a better 
knowledge of some men and women with whom I had 
talked for years before to little purpose. It is most 
wonderful that he produces this effect, because he him- 
self is so silent ; but there is some secret charm in his 
very smile which puts people en rapport with each 
other, and with him at once. 

I am almost afraid to go on with the list of the things 
my companion can do. I have not yet told the half, 
nor the most wonderful; and I believe I have already 
overtaxed creduHty. I will mention only one more, — 
but that is to me far more inexplicable than all the rest 
I am sure that it belongs, with mesmerism and clair- 
voyance, to the domain of the higher psychological 
mysteries. He has in rare hours Che power of pro- 
ducing the portraits of persons whom you have loved, 
but whom he has never seen. For this it is necessary 
tliat you should concentrate your whole attention en 
him, as is always needful to secure the best results of 
P5i<*.smeric power. It must also be late and still lo 



126 BITS OF TALK, 

the day, or in a storm, I have never known him to suc- 
ceed in this. For these portraits he uses only shadowy 
gray tints. He begins with a hesitating outHne. If 
you are not tenderly and closely in attention, he throws 
it aside; he can do nothing. But if you are with him, 
heart and soul, and do not take your eyes from his, he 
will presently fill out the dear faces, full, life-like, and 
wearing a smile, which makes you sure that they too 
must have been summoned from the other side, as you 
from this, to meet on the shadowy boundary between 
flesh and spirit. He must see them as clearly as he 
sees you ; and it would be little more for his magic to 
do if he were at the same moment showing to their 
longing eyes your face and answering smile. 

But I delay too long the telling of his name. A 
strange hesitancy seizes me. I shall never be believed 
by any one who has not sat as I have by his side. But, 
if I can only give to one soul the good-cheer and 
strength of such a presence, I shall be rewarded. 

His name ia Maple Wood-fire, and his terms are 
from eight to twelve dollars a month, according to the 
amount of time he gives. This price is ridiculously 
low, but it is all that any member of the family asks ; 
in fact, in some parts of the country, they can be hired 
for much less. They have connections by the name 
of Hickory, whose terms are higher ; but I cannot find 
out that they are any more satisfactory. There are also 
some distant relations, named Chestnut and Pine, who 
can be employed in the same way, at a much lower rate ; 
but they are all snappish and uncertain in temper. 



A COMPANION FOR THE WINTER. 127 

To the whole world I commend the good brotherhood 
of Maple, and pass on the emphatic indorsement of a 
blessed old black woman who came to my room the 
other day, and, standing before the rollicking blaze on 
my hearth, said, " Bless yer, honey, yer's got a wood- 
fire. I'se allers said that, if yer's got a wood-fire, ycr'ff 
got meat, an* drink, an' clo'es." 



ia8 BITS OF TALK 



CHOICE OF COLORS. 

'T^HE other day, as I was walking on one of the 
"^ oldest and most picturesque streets of the old 
and picturesque town of Newport, R. I., I saw a Httle 
girl standing before the window of a milliner's shop. 

It was a very rainy day. The pavement of the side- 
walks on this street is so sunken and irregular that in 
wet weather, unless one walks with very great care, he 
steps continually into small wells of water. Up to her 
ankles in one of these wells stood the little girl, appar- 
ently as unconscious as if she were high and dry before 
a fire. It was a very cold day too. I was hurrying 
along, wrapped in furs, and not quite warm enough even 
so. The child was but thinly clothed. She wore an old 
plaid shawl and a ragged knit hood of scarlet worsted. 
One Httle red ear stood out unprotected by the hood, 
and drops of water trickled down over it from her hain 
She seemed to be pointing with her finger at articles in 
the window, and talking to some one inside. I watched 
her for several moments, and then crossed the street to 
see what it all meant. I stole noiselessly up behind 
her, and she did not hear me. The window was full 
of artificial flowers, of the cheapest sort, but of very gay 



CHOICE OF COLORS. 1 29 

colors. Here and there a knot of ribbon or a bit of 
lace had been tastefully added, and the whole elTect was 
really remarkably gay and pretty. Tap, tap, tap, went 
the small hand against the window-pane ; and with 
every tap the unconscious little creature murmured, in 
a half- whispering, half-singing voice, " I choose that 
color.*' "" I choose that color." " I choose that color." 

I stood motionless. I could not see her face ; but 
there was in her whole attitude and tone the heartiest 
content and delight. I moved a little to the right, hop- 
ing to see her face, without her seeing me; but the 
slight movement caught her ear, and in a second she 
had sprung aside and turned toward me. The spell 
was broken. She was no longer the queen of an air- 
castle, decking herself in all the rainbow hues which 
pleased her eye. She was a poor beggar child, out in 
the rain, and a little frightened at the approach of a 
stranger. She did not move away, however ; but stood 
eying me irresolutely, with that pathetic mixture of 
interrogation and defiance in her face which is so often 
seen in the prematurely developed faces of poverty- 
stricken children. 

" Aren't the colors pretty ? " I said. She brightened 
Instantly. 

" Yes'm. Pd like a goon av thit blue." 

" But you will take cold standing in the wet," said I. 
*• Won't you come under my umbrella ? " 

She looked down at her wet dress suddenly, as if it 
had not occurred to her before that it was raining. 
Then she drew first one little foot and then the othef 



I30 BITS OF TALK. 

out of the muddy puddle in which she had been standing 
and, moving a little closer to the window, said, " I'm 
not jist goin' home, mem. I'd like to stop here a bit." 

So I left her. But, after I had gone a few blocks, 
the impulse seized me to return by a cross street, and 
see if she were still there. Tears sprang to my eyes as 
I first caught sight of the upright httle figure, standing 
in the same spot, still pointing with the rhythmic finger 
to the blues and reds and yellows, and half chanting 
under her breath, as before, " I choose that color." " I 
choose that color." " I choose that color." 

I went quietly on my way, without disturbing her 
again. But I said in my heart, "Little Messenger, 
Interpreter, Teacher! I will remember you all my 
Hfe." 

Why should days ever be dark, life ever be color- 
less ? There is always sun ; there are always blue 
and scarlet and yellow and purple. We cannot reach 
them, perhaps, but we can see them, if it is only 
*^ through a glass," and "darkly," — still we can see 
them. We can " choose " our colors. It rains, per- 
haps ; and we are standing in the cold. Never mind. 
If we look earnestly enough at the brightness which is 
on the other side of the glass, we shall forget the wet 
and not feel the cold. And now and then a passer-by, 
wh(3 has rolled himself up in furs to keep out the cold, 
but shivers nevertheless, — who has money in his 
purse to buy many colors, if he likes, but, neverthe- 
less, goes grumbling because some colors are too dear 
for him, — such a passer-by, chancing to hear our 



CHOICE OF COLORS. I'M 

voice, and see the atmosphere of our content, may 
learn a wondrous secret, — that pennilessness is not 
poverty, and ownership is not possession ; that to be 
without is not always to lack, and to reach is not to 
attain ; that sunlight is for all eyes that look up, and 
colot for those who " choose." 



«33 BITS OF TALK. 



THE APOSTLE OF BEAUTY. 

TTE is not of the twelve, any more than the golden 
-*■ -*• rule is of the ten. " A greater commandment I 
give unto you," was said of that. Also it was called 
the " new commandment." Yet it was really older than 
the rest, and greater only because it included them all. 
There were those who kept it ages before Moses went 
up Sinai : Joseph, for instance, his ancestor ; and the 
king's daughter, by whose goodness he lived. So 
stands the Apostle of Beauty, greater than the twelve, 
newer and older; setting Gospel over against law, 
having known law before its beginning ; living trium- 
phantly free and unconscious of penalty. 

He has had martyrdom, and will have. His church 
is never established ; the world does not follow him; 
only of Wisdom is he known, and of her children, 
who are children of light. He never speaks by their 
mouths who say "Shalt not." He knows that "shalt 
not" is illegitimate, puny, trying always to usurp the 
throne of the true king, " Thou shalt." 

"This is delight," "this is good to see," he says of 
a purity, of a fair thing. It needs not to speak of the 
impurity, of the ugliness. Left unmentioned, unfor- 
bidden, who knows how soon they might die out of 



J ■■ 



THE APOSTLE OF BEAUTY, 133 

men's lives, perhaps even from the earth's surface? 
Men hedging gardens have for centuries set plants 
under that " letter of law " which "killeth," until the 
very word hedge has become a pain and an offence ; 
and all the while there have been standing in ever^ 
wild country graceful walls of unhindered brier and 
berry, to which the apostles of beauty have been 
silently pointing. By degrees gardeners have learned 
something. The best of them now call themselves 
"landscape gardeners;" and that is a concession, if 
it means, as I suppose it does, that they will try to 
copy Nature's landscapes in their enclosures. I have 
seen also of late that on rich men's estates tangled 
growths of native bushes are being more let alone, and 
hedges seem to have had some of the weights and har- 
ness taken off of them. 

This is but one Httle matter among millions with 
which the Apostle of Beauty has to do ; but it serves 
for instance of the first requisite he demands, which is 
freedom. " Let use take care of itself." " It will," he 
says. " There is no beauty without freedom." 

Nothing is too high for him, nothing too low or 
small. To speak more truly, in his eyes there is no 
small, no low. From a philanthropy down to a gown, 
one cathohc necessity, one catholic principle ; gowns 
can be benefactions or injuries ; philanthropies can be 
well or ill clad. 

He has a ministry of co-workers, — men, women, and 
guileless little children. Many of them serve him with- 
out knowing him by name. Some who serve him best, 



134 BITS OF TALK. 

who spread his creeds most widely, who teach them 
most eloquently, die without dreaming that they have 
been missionaries to Gentiles. Others there are who 
call him " Lord, Lord," build temples to him and teach 
in them, who never know him. These are they who 
give their goods to the poor, their bodies to be burned ; 
but are each day ungracious, unloving, hard, cruel to 
men and women about them. These are they also who 
make bad statues, bad pictures, invent frightful fashions 
of things to be worn, and make the houses and the 
rooms in which they live hideous with unsightly adorn- 
ments. The centuries fight such, — now with a Titian, 
a Michel Angelo ; now with a great philanthropist, 
who is also peaceable and easy to be entreated ; now 
with a Florence Nightingale, knowing no sect; now 
with a Httle child by a roadside, holding up a mari- 
gold in the sun ; now with a sweet-faced old woman, 
dying gracefully in some almshouse. Who has not 
heard voice from such apostles ? 

To-day my nearest, most eloquent apostle of beauty 
is a poor shoemaker, who lives in the house where I 
lodge. How poor he must be I dare not even try to 
understand. He has six children : the oldest not more 
than thirteen, the third a deaf-mute, the baby puny and 
ill, — sure, I think (and hope), to die soon. 

They live in two rooms, on the ground-floor. His 
shop is the right-hand corner of the front room ; the 
rest is bedroom and sitting-room ; behind are the bed- 
room and kitchen. I have never seen so much as I 
might of their way of hving; for I stand before his 



THE APOSTLE OF BEAUTY. 135 

window with more reverent fear of intruding by a look 
than I should have at the door of a king's chamber. A 
narrow rough ledge added to the window-sill is his 
bench. Behind this he sits from six in the morning till 
seven at night, bent over, sewing slowly and painfully on 
the coarsest shoes. His face looks old enough for sixty 
years ; but he cannot be so old. Yet he wears glasses 
and walks feebly ; he has probably never had in any 
one day of his life enough to eat. But I do not know 
any man, and I know only one woman, who has such 
a look of radiant good-cheer and content as has this 
poor shoemaker, Anton Grasl. 

In his window are coarse wooden boxes, in which 
are growing the common mallows. They are just now 
in full bloom, — row upon rov/ of gay-striped purple 
and white bells. The window looks to the east, and is 
never shut. When I go out to my breakfast the sun 
is streaming in on the flowers and Anton's face. He 
looks up, smiles, bows low, and says, " Good-day, good 
my lady," sometimes holding the mallow-stalks back 
with one hand, to see me more plainly. I feel as if the 
day and I had had benediction. It is always a better 
day because Anton has said it is good ; and I am a 
better woman for sight of his godly contentment. Al- 
most every day he has beside the mallows in the 
boxes a white mug with flowers in it, — nasturtiums, 
perhaps, or a few pinks. This he sets carefully in 
shade of the thickest mallows ; and this I have often 
seen him hold down tenderly, for the little ones to see 
and to smell 



13^ BITS OF TALK, 

When I come home in the evening!,, oetween eight 
and nine o'clock, Anton is always sitting in front of 
the door, resting his head against the wall. This is 
his recreation, his one blessed hour of out-door air and 
rest He stands with his cap in his hand while I pass 
and his face shines as if all the concentrated enjoy- 
ment of my walk in the woods had descended upon him 
in my first look. If I give him a bunch of ferns to add 
to his nasturtiums and pinks, he is so grateful and de- 
lighted that I have to go into the house quickly for fear 
I shall cry. Whenever I am coming back from a drive, 
I begin to think, long before I reach the house, how 
glad Anton will look when he sees the carriage stop. 
I am as sure as if I had omniscient sight into the depths 
of his good heart that he has distinct and unenvious joy 
in every pleasure that he sees other people taking. 

Never have I heard one angry or hasty word, one 
petulant or weary cry from the rooms in which this 
father and mother and six children are struggling to 
live. All day long the barefooted and ragged little ones 
play under my south windows, and do not quarrel. I 
amuse myself by dropping grapes or plums on their 
heads, and then watching them at their feast ; never 
have I seen them dispute or struggle in the division. 
Once I purposely threw a large bunch of grapes to the 
poor little mute, and only a few plums to the others. 
I am sorry to say that voiceless Carl ate all his grapes 
himself; but not a selfish or discontented look could I 
see on the faces of the others, — they all smiled and 
beamed up at me hke suns. 



THE APOSTLE OF BEAUTY. lyj 

It is Anton who creates and sustains this rare at- 
mosphere. The wife is only a common and stupid 
woman ; he is educating her, as he is the children. She 
is very thin and worn and hungry-looking, but always 
smiles. Being Anton's wife, she could not do other- 
wise. 

Sometimes I see people passing the house, who give 
a careless glance of contemptuous pity at Anton's win- 
dow of mallows and nasturtiums. Then I remember 
that an apostle wrote : — 

" There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices iw 
the world, and none of them is without signification. 

" Therefore, if I know not the meaning of the voice> 
I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he 
that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me." 

And I long to call after them, as they go groping 
their way down the beautiful street, — 

" Oh, ye barbarians, blind and deaf! How dare you 
think you can pity Anton ? His soul would melt in 
compassion for you, if he were able to comprehend that 
lives could be so poor as yours. He is the rich man, 
and you are poor. Eating only the husks on which 
you feed, he would starve to death." 



«/lS BITS OF TALK. 



ENGLISH LODGING-HOUSES. 

OOMEBODY who has written stories (is it 
^^ Dickens ?) has given us very wrong ideas of the 
English lodging-house. What good American does 
not go into London with the distinct impression that, 
whatever else he does or does not do, he will upon no 
account live in lodgings ? That he will even be content 
with the comfortless coffee-room of a second-rate hotel, 
and fraternize with commercial travellers from all quar- 
ters of the globe, rather than come into relations with 
that mixture of vulgarity and dishonesty, the lodging- 
house keeper ? 

It was with more than such misgiving that I first I 

crossied the threshold of Mrs. 's house in Bedford 

Place, Bloomsbury. At this distance I smile to re- 
member how welcome would have been any alternative 
rather than the remaining under her roof for a month ; 
how persistently for several days I doubted and re- 
sisted the evidence of all my senses, and set myself at 
work to find the discomforts and shortcomings which 
I believed must belong to that mode of life. To con- 
fess the stupidity and obstinacy of my ignorance is 



$ 



ENGLISH LODGING-HOUSES 139 

small reparation, and would be little worth while, 
except for the hope that my account of the comfort 
and economy in living on the English lodging-house 
system may be a seed dropped in due season, which 
shall spring up sooner or later in the introduction of a 
similar system in America. The gain which it would 
be to great numbers of our men and women who must 
live on small incomes cannot be estimated. It seems 
hardly too much to say that in the course of one gen- 
eration it might work in the average public health a 
change which would be shown in statistics, and rid us 
of the stigma of a " national disease " of dyspepsia. 
For the men and women whose sufferings and ill- 
health have made of our name a by-word among the 
nations are not, as many suppose, the rich men and 
women, tempted by their riches to over-indulgence of 
their stomachs, and paying in their dyspepsia simply 
the fair price of their folly ; they are the moderately 
poor men and women, w^ho are paying cruel penalty for 
not having been richer, — not having been rich enough 
to avoid the poisons which are cooked and served in 
American restaurants and in the poorer class of Ameri- 
can homes. 

Mrs. 's lodging-house was not, so far as I know, 

any better than the average lodging-houses of its grade. 
It was well situated, well furnished, well kept, and its 
scale of prices was moderate. For instance, the rent 
of a pleasant parlor and bedroom on the second floor 
was thirty-four shillings a week, including fire and gas, 
— 358.50, gold. Then there was a charge of two shil- 



140 BITS OF TALK, 

Hngs a week for the use of the kitchen-fire, and three 
shilhngs a week for service ; and these were the only 
charges in addition to the rent. Thus for $9.75 a 
week one had all the comforts that can be had in 
housekeeping, so far as room and service are con- 
cerned. There were four good servants, — cook, scul- 
lery maid, and two housemaids. Oh, the pleasant 
voices and gentle fashions of behavior of those house- 
maids ! They were slow, it must be owned ; but their 
results were admirable. In spite of London smoke 
and grime, Mrs. — — 's floors and windows were clean ; 
the grates shone every morning like mirrors, and the 
glass and silver were bright. Each morning the 
smiling cook came up to take our orders for the meals 
of the day ; each day the grocer and the baker and the 
butcher stopped at the door and left the sugar for the 
" first floor front," the beef for the "drawing-room," and 
so on. The smallest article which could be required 
in housekeeping was not overlooked. The groceries 
of the different floors never got mixed, though how 
this separateness of stores was accomplished will for 
ever remain a mystery to me ; but that it was success- 
fully accomplished the smallness of our bill was the 
best of proof, — unless, indeed, as we were sometimes 

almost afraid, we did now and then eat up Dr. A 's 

cheese, or drink the milk belonging to the B's below us. 
We were a party of four ; our fare was of the plain, 
substantial sort, but of sufficient variety and abun- 
dance ; and yet our living never cost us, including 
rent, service, fires, and food, over %6o a week. If we 



ENGLISH LODGING-HOUSES. 141 

had chosen to practise closer economies, we might 
have lived on less. Compare for one instant the com- 
fort of such an arrangement as this, which really gave 
us every possible advantage to be secured by house- 
keeping, and with almost none of the trouble, with any 
boarding or lodging possible in New York. We had 
two parlors and two bedrooms ; our meals served 
promptly and neatly, in our own parlor. The same 
amount of room, and service, and such a table, for four 
people, cannot be had in New York for less than $150 
or $200 a week ; in fact, they cannot be had in New 
York for any sum of money. The quiet respectfulness 
of behavior and faithful interest in work of English 
servants on English soil are not to be found elsewhere. 
We afterward lived for some weeks in another lodging- 
house in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, at about the 
same price per week. This house was even better 
than the London one in some respects. The system 
was precisely the same ; but the cooking was al- 
most faultless, and the table appointments were more 
than satisfactory, — they were tasteful. The china 
was a pleasure, and there were silver and linen and 
glass which one would be glad to have in one's own 
home. 

It may be asked, and not unnaturally, how does 
this lodging-house system work for those who keep 
the houses ? Can it be possible that all this com- 
fort and economy for lodgers are compatible with 
profits for landlords ? I can judge only from the re- 
sults in these two cases which came under my own 



142 BITS OF TALK. 

observation. In each of these cases the family who 
kept the house lived comfortably and pleasantly in 
their own apartment, which was, in the London house, 
almost as good a suite of rooms as any which they 
rented. They certainly had far more apparent quiet, 
comfort, and privacy than is commonly seen in the 
arrangements of the keepers of average boarding- 
houses. In the Malvern house, one whole floor, which 
was less pleasant than the others, but still comfortable 
and well furnished, was occupied by the family. There 
were three little boys, under ten years of age, who had 
their nursery governess, said lessons to her regularly, 
and were led out decorously to walk by her at appointed 
seasons, like all the rest of good little English boys in 
well-regulated families ; and yet the mother of these 
children came to the door of our parlor each raoriiing, 
with the respectful air of an old family housekeeper, to 
ask what we would have for dinner, and was careful 
and exact in buying " three penn'orth " of herbs at a 
time for us, to season our soup. I ought to mention 
that in both these places we made the greater part of 
our purchases ourselves, having weekly bills sent in 
from the shops, and in our names, exactly as if we were 
living in our own house. All honest lodging-house 
keepers, we were told, preferred this method, as leaving 
no opening for any unjust suspicions of their fairness 
in providing. But, if one chooses to be as absolutely 
free from trouble as in boarding, the marketing can all 
be done by the family, and the bills still made out in 
the lodgers' names. I have been thus minute in my 



ENGLISH LODGING-HOUSES, 143 

details because I think there may be many to whom 
this system of living is as unknown as it was to me ; 
and I cannot but hope that it may yet be introduced 
ID America. 



144 BITS OF TALK. 



WET THE CLAY. 

^ \NCE I stood in Miss Hosmer's studio, looking 
^^ at a statue which she was modelling of the ex- 
queen of Naples. Face to face with the clay model, I 
always feel the artist's creative power far more than 
when I am looking at the immovable marble. 

A touch here — there — and all is changed. Per- 
haps, under my eyes, in the twinkling of an eye, one 
trait springs into life and another disappears. 

The queen, who is a very beautiful woman, was rep- 
resented in Miss Hosmer's statue as standing, wearing 
the picturesque cloak that she wore during those hard 
days of garrison life at Gaeta, when she showed her- 
self so brave and strong that the world said if she, in- 
stead of that very stupid young man her husband, had 
been king, the throne need not have been lost. The 
very cloak, made of light cloth showily faced with scar- 
let, was draped over a lay figure in one corner of the 
room. In the statue the folds of drapery over the right 
arm were entirely disarranged, simply rough clay. The 
day before they had been apparently finished ; but that 
morning Miss Hosmer had, as she laughingly told us, 
*^ pulled it all to pieces again." 

As she said this, she took up a large syringe and 



WET THE CLAY. 145 

showered the statue from head to foot with water, tiU 
it dripped and shone as if it had been justpkinged into 
a bath. Now it was in condition to be moulded. Many 
times a day this process must be repeated, or the clay 
becomes so dry and hard that it cannot be worked. 

I had known this before ; but never did I so realize 
the significant symbolism of the act as when I looked 
at this lifeless yet lifehke thing, to be made into the 
beauty of a woman, called by her name, and cherished 
after her death, — and saw that only through this chrys- 
ahs of the clay, so cared for, moistened, and moulded, 
could the marble obtain its soul. 

And, as all things I see in life seem to me to have a 
voice either for or of children, so did this instantly 
suggest to me that most of the failures of mothers come 
from their not keeping the clay wet 

The slightest touch tells on the clay when it is soft 
and moist, and can produce just the effect which is de- 
sired ; but when the clay is too dry it will not yield, 
and often it breaks and crumbles beneath the unskilful 
hand. How perfect the analogy between these two 
results, and the two atmospheres which one often sees 
in the space of one half-hour in the management of the 
same child ! One person can win from it instantly a 
gentle obedience : that person's smile is a reward, that 
person's displeasure is a grief it cannot bear, that per- 
son's opinions have utmost weight with it, that person's 
presence is a controlling and subduing influence. An- 
other, perhaps, alas ! the mother, produces such an op- 
posite effect that it is hard to believe the child can be the 

10 



H^ BITS OF TALK. 

same child. Her simplest command is met by antag- 
onism or sullen compliance ; her pleasure and dis- 
pleasure are plainly of no account to the child, and its 
great desire is to get out of her presence. 

What shape will she make of that child's soul ? 
She does not wet the clay. She does not stop to con- 
sider before each command whether it be wholly just, 
whether it be the best time to make it, and whether she 
can explain its necessity. Oh ! the sweet reason- 
ableness of children when disagreeable necessities are 
explained to them, instead of being enforced as arbi- 
trary tyrannies ! She does not make them so feel that 
she shares all their sorrows and pleasures that they 
cannot help being in turn glad when she is glad, and 
sorry when she is sorry. She does not so take them 
into constant companionship in her interests, each day, 

— the books, the papers she reads, the things she sees, 

— that they learn to hold her as the representative of 
much more than nursery discipline, clothes, and bread 
and butter. She does not kiss them often enough, put . 
her arms around them, warm, soften, bathe them in the p 
ineffable sunshine of loving ways. " I can't imagine ^ 
why children are so much better with you than with 
me," exclaims such a mother. No, she cannot imagine ; 
and that is the trouble. If she could, all would be 
righted. It is quite probable that she is a far more 
anxious, self-sacrificing, hard-working mother than the 
neighbor, whose children are rosy and frolicking and 
affectionate and obedient ; while hers are pale and fret- 
ful and selfish and sullen. 



aTET the LLAr 147 

She is all tlie time working, working, with endless 
activity, on hard, dry clay ; and the neighbor, who, 
perhaps half-unconsciously, keeps the clay wet, is 
with one-half the labor modelling sweet creatures of 
Nature's own loveliest shapes. 

Then she says, this poor, tired mother, discouraged 
Decause her children tell lies, and irritated because they 
seem to her thankless, " After all, children are pretty 
much alike, I suppose. I believe most children teD 
lies when they are little ; and they never realize until 
they are grown up what parents do for them." 

Here again I find a similitude among the artists who 
paint or model. Studios are full of such caricatures, 
and the hard-working, honest souls who have made 
them believe that they are true reproductions of nature 
and life. 

" See my cherub. Are not all cherubs such as he ? " 
and "Behold these trees and this water ; and how the 
sun glowed on the day when I walked there ! " and all 
the while the cherub is like a paper doU, and the trees 
and the water never had any likeness to any thing that 
is in this beautiful earth. But, after all, this simiHtude 
is short and paltry, for it is of comparatively small 
moment that so many men and women spend their 
lives in making bad cherubs in marble, and hideous 
landscapes in oil. It i& industry', and it keeps them in 
bread; in butter, too, if tlieir cherubs and trees are 
very bad. But, when it is a human being that is to be 
moulded, how do we dare, even with all the help which 
we can ask and find in earth and in heaven, to shape 
it by our touch \ 



148 BITS OF TALK, 

Clay in the hands of the potter is not more plastic 
than is the httle child's soul in the hands of those who 
tend it. Alas ! how many shapeless, how many ill- 
formed, how many broken do we see ! Who does not 
believe that the image of God could have been beauti- 
ful on all ? Sooner or later it will be, thank Christ I 
But what a pity, what a loss, not to have had the sweet 
blessedness of being even here fellow- workers with 
him in this glorious modelling for eternity ! 



THE KING'S FRIEND, l^q 



THE KING'S FRIEND. 

TT TE are a gay party, summering among the hills. 
^^ New-comers into the little boarding-house 
where we, by reason of prior possession, hold a kind 
of sway are apt to fare hardly at our hands unless they 
come up to our standard. We are not exacting in the 
matter of clothes ; we are liberal on creeds ; but we 
have our shibboleths. And, though we do not drown 
unlucky Ephraimites, whose tongues make bad work 
with S's, I fear we are not quite kind to them ; they 
never stay long, and so we go on having it much our 
own way. 

Week before last a man appeared at dinner, of whom 
our good little landlady said, deprecatingly, that he 
would stay only a few days. She knew by instinct 
that his presence would not be agreeable to us. He 
was not in the least an intrusive person, — on the con- 
trary, there was a sort of mute appeal to our humanity 
in the very extent of his quiet inoffensiveness ; but his 
whole atmosphere was utterly uninteresting. He was 
untrained in manner, awkwardly ill at ease in the table 
routine ; and, altogether, it was so uncomfortable to 
make any attempt to include him in our circle that in 



ISO BITS OF TALK. 

a few days he was ignored by every one. to a degree 
which was neither courteous nor Christian. 

In all families there is a leader. Ours is a charming 
and brilliant married woman, whose ready wit and 
never-faihng spirits make her the best of centres for a 
country party of pleasure-seekers. Her keen sense of 
humor had not been able entirely to spare this unfor- 
tunate man, whose attitudes and movements were cer- 
tainly at times almost irresistible. 

But one morning such a change was apparent in her 
manner toward him that we all looked up in surprise. 
No more gracious and gentle greeting could she have 
given him if he had been a prince of royal line. Our 
astonishment almost passed bounds when we heard her 
continue with a kindly inquiry after his health, and, 
undeterred by his evident readiness to launch into 
detailed symptoms, listen to him with the most re- | 

spectful attention. Under the influence of this new 
and sweet recognition his plain and common face 
kindled into something almost manly and individual 
He had never before been so spoken to by a well-bred 
and beautiful woman. 

We were sobered, in spite of ourselves, by an inde- 
finable something in her manner ; and it was with 
subdued whispers that we crowded around her on the 
piazza, and begged to know what it all meant. It was 

a rare thing to see Mrs. hesitate for a reply. 

The color rose in her face, and, with a half-nervous 
attempt at a smile, she finally said, "Well, girls, I sup- 
pose you will all laugh at me ; but the truth is, I lieard 



I 



THE KING'S FRIEND. 151 

that man say his prayers this morning. You know 
his room is next to mine, and there is a great crack in 
the door. I heard him praying, this morning, for ten 
minutes, just before breakfast ; and I never heard such 
tones in my life. I donH pretend to be religious ; but 
I must own it was a wonderful thing to hear a man 
talking with God as he did. And w^hen I saw him at 
table, I felt as if I were looking in the face of some 
one who had just come out of the presence of the 
King of kings, and had the very air of heaven about 
him. I can't help what the rest of you do or say ; / 
shall always have the same feeling whenever I see 
him." 

There was a magnetic earnestness in her tone and 
look, which we all felt, and which some of us will 
never forget. 

During the few remaining days of his stay with us, 
that untutored, uninteresting, stupid man knew no 
lack of friendly courtesy at our hands. We were the 
better for his homely presence ; unawares, he minis- 
tered unto us. When we knew that he came directly 
from speaking to the Master to speak to us, we felt 
that he w^as greater than we, and we remembered that 
it is written, " If any man serve me, him will my Fathei 
honor," 



152 BITS OF TALK 



LEARNING TO SPEAK. 

TT7ITI1 what breathless interest we listen for the 
^ ^ baby's ifirst word ! What a new bond is at once 
and for ever established between its soul and ours by 
this mysterious, inexplicable, almost incredible fact ! 
That is the use of the word. That is its only use, so 
far as mere gratification of the ear goes. Many other 
sounds are more pleasurable, — the baby's laugh, foi 
instance, or its inarticulate murmurs of contend or 
sleepiness. 

But the word is a revelation, a sacred sign. Now 
we shall know what our beloved one wants ; now we 
shall know when and why the dear heart sorrows or is 
glad. How reassured we feel, how confident ! Now we 
cannot make mistakes ; we shall do all for the best ; we I 

can give happiness ; we can communicate wisdom ; * 

relation is established ; the perplexing gulf of silence is 
bridged. The baby speaks ! 

But it is not of the baby's learning to speak tha*- we 
propose to write here. All babies learn to speak ; or, 
if they do not, we know that it means a terrible visita- 
tion, — a calamity rare, thank God ! but bitter almost 
beyond parents' strength to bear. 

But why, having once learned to speak, does the 



LEARNING TO SPEAK. 153 

baby leave off speaking when it becomes a man or a 
woman ? Many of our men and women to-day need, 
almost as much as when they were twenty-four months 
old, to learn to speak. We do not mean learning to 
speak in pubHc. We do not mean even learning to 
speak well, — to pronounce words clearly and accu- 
rately ; though there is need enough of that in this 
land ! But that is not the need at which we are aim- 
mg now. We mean something so much simpler, so 
much further back, that we hardly know how to say it 
in words which shall be simple enough and also suffi- 
ciently strong. We mean learning to speak at all! 
In spite of all which satirical writers have said and say 
of the loquacious egotism, the questioning curiosity of 
our people, it is true to-day that the average American 
is a reticent, taciturn, speechless creature, who, for his 
own sake, and still more for the sake of all who love 
him, needs, more than he needs any thing else under 
heaven, to learn to speak. 

Look at our silent railway and horse-cars, steamboat- 
cabins, hotel-tables, in short, all our public places 
where people are thrown together incidentally, and 
where good-will and the habit of speaking combined 
would create an atmosphere of human vitality, quitt 
unlike what we see now. But it is not of so much con- 
sequence, after all, whether people speak in these public 
places or not. If they did, one very unpleasant phase 
of our national life would be greatly changed for the 
better. But it is in our homes that this speechlessness 
tells most fearfully, — on the breakfast and dinner and 



154 I^ITS OF TALK 

tea-tables, at which a silent father and mother sit down 
in haste and gloom to feed their depressed children. 
This is especially true of men and women in the rural 
districts. They are tired ; they have more work to do 
in a year than it is easy to do. Their lives are monotO" 
nous, — too much so for the best health of either mind 
or body. If they dreamed how much this monotony 
could be broken and cheered by the constant habit of 
talking with each other, they would grasp at the slight- 
est chance of a conversation. Sometimes it almost 
seems as if complaints and antagonism were better 
than such stagnant quiet. But there need not be com- 
plaint and antagonism ; there is no home so poor, so 
remote from affairs, that each day does not bring and 
set ready, for family welcome and discussion, beautiful 
sights and sounds, occasions for helpfulness and grati- 
tude, questions for decision, hjpes, fears, regrets ! The 
elements of human life are the same for ever ; any one 
heart holds in itself the whole, can give all things to 
another, can bear all things for another ; but no giv- 
ing, no bearing, no, not even if it is the giving up of a 
life, if it is done without free, full, loving interchange 
of speech, is half the blessing it might be. 

Many a wife goes down to her grave a dulled and 
dispirited woman simply because her good and faith- 
ful husband has lived by her side without talking to 
her ! There have been days when one word of praise, 
or one word even of simple good cheer, would have 
girded her up with new strength. She did not know^ 
very likely, whit she needed, or that she needed any 
thing ; but she drooped. 



LEARNING TO SPEAK. 135 

Many a child grows up a hard, unimpressionable, 
tinloving man or woman simply from the uncheered 
silence in which the first ten years of life were passed. 
Very few fathers and mothers, even those who are 
fluent, perhaps, in society, habitually talk with their 
children. 

It is certam that this is one of the worst shortcom- 
ings of our homes. Perhaps no other single change 
would do so much to make them happier, and, there- 
fore, to make our communities better, as for men and 
women to learn to speak. 



IS5 BITS OF TALK. 



PRIVATE TYRANTS. 

TT 7E recognize tyranny when it wears a crown and 
^ ^ sits on an hereditary throne. We sympathize 
with nations that overthrow the thrones, and in our 
secret hearts we almost canonize individuals who slay 
the tyrants. From the days of Ehud and Eglon down 
to those of Charlotte Corday and Marat, the world has 
dealt tenderly with their names whose hands have been 
red with the blood of oppressors. On moral grounds 
it would be hard to justify this sentiment, murder be- 
ing murder all the same, however great gain it may be 
to this world to have the murdered man put out of it ; 
but that there is such a sentiment, instinctive and 
strong in the human soul, there is no den3nng. It is 
so instinctive and so strong that, if we watch our- 
selves closely, we shall find it giving alarming shape 
sometimes to our secret thoughts about our neigh- 
bors. 

How many communities, how many households even^ 
are without a tyrant? If we could "move for returns 
of suffering, ' as that tender and thoughtful man, Arthur 
Helps, says, we should find a far heavier aggregate of 



PRIVATE TYRANTS. 157 

misery inflicted by unsuspected, unresisted tyrannies 
than by those which are patent to everybody, and sure 
to be overthrown sooner or later. 

An exhaustive sermon on this subject should be set 
off in three divisions, as follows : — 



PRIVATE TYRANTS. 

1st. Number of — 
2d. Nature of — 
3^. Longevity of — 

First Their number. They are not enumerated m 
any census. Not even the most painstaking statistician 
has meddled with the topic. Fancy takes bold leaps at 
the very suggestion of such an estimate, and begins to 
think at once of all things in the universe which are 
usually mentioned as beyond numbering. Probably 
one good way of getting at a certain sort of result would 
be to ask each person of one's acquaintance, " Do you 
happen to know a private tyrant ? " 

How well we know beforehand the replies we should 
get from some beloved men and women, — that is, if 
they spoke the truth ! 

But they would not. That is the saddest thing about 
these private tyrannies. They are in many cases borne 
in such divine and uncomplaining silence by their vic- 
tims, perhaps for long years, that the world never dreams 
of their existence. But at last the fine, subtle writing, 
which no control, no patience, no will can thwart, bc« 



158 BITS OF TALK 

comes set on the man's or the woman's face, and tells 
the whole record. Who does not know such faces ? 
Cheerful usually, even gay, brave, and ready with lines 
of smile ; but in repose so marked, so scarred with 
unutterable weariness and disappointment, that tears 
spring in the eyes and love in the hearts of all finely 
organized persons who meet them. 

Secondly, Nature of private tyrants. Here also the 
statistician has not entered. The field is vast ; the 
analysis difficult. 

Selfishness is, of course, their leading characteristic ; 
In fact, the very sum and substance of their natures. 
But selfishness is Protean. It has as many shapes 
as there are minutes, and as many excuses and 
wraps of sheep's clothing as ever ravening wolf pos- 
sessed. 

One of its commonest pleas is that of weakness. 
Here it often is so inextricably mixed with genuine 
need and legitimate claim that one grows bewildered 
between sympathy and resentment. In this shape, 
however, it gets its crudest dominion over strong and 
generous and tender people. This kind of tyranny 
builds up and fortifies its bulwarks on and out of the 
very virtues of its victims ; it gains strength hourly 
from the very strength of the strength to which it ap- 
peals ; each slow and fatal encroachment never seems 
at first so much a thing required as a thing offered ; 
but, like the slow sinking inch by inch of that great, 
beautiful city of stone into the relentless Adriatic, so is 
the slow, sure going down and loss of the freedom of a 



PRIVATE TYRANTS. 159 

strong, beautiful soul, helpless in the omnipresent cir- 
cumference of the selfish nature to which it is or 
believes itself bound. 

That the exactions never or rarely take shape in 
words is, to the unbiassed looker-on, only an exasperat- 
ing feature in their tyranny. While it saves the con- 
science of the tyrant, — if such tyrants have any, — it 
makes doubly sure the success of their tyranny. And 
probably nothing short of revelation from Heaven, in 
shape of blinding light, would ever open their eyes to 
the fact that it is even more selfish to hold a generous 
spirit fettered hour by hour by a constant fear of giving 
pain than to coerce or threaten or scold them into the 
desired behavior. Invalids, all invalids, stand in deadly 
peril of becoming tyrants of this order. A chronic in 
valid who entirely escapes it must be so nearly saint or 
angel that one instinctively feels as if such invalid- 
ism would soon end in the health of heaven. We 
know of one invalid woman, chained to her bed for long 
years by an incurable disease, who has had the insight 
and strength to rise triumphant above this danger. Her 
constant wish and entreaty is that her husband should 
go freely into all the work and the pleasure of Hfe. 
Whenever he leaves her, her farewell is not, *' How 
soon do you think you shall come back ? At what hour, 
or day, may I look for you ? " but, *^ Now, pray stay 
just as long as you enjoy it. If you hurry home one 
hour sooner for the thought of me, I shall be wretched." 
It really seems almost as if the longer he stayed away, 
— hours, days, weeks even, — the happier she were. 



lOO BITS OF TALK, 

By this sweet and wise unselfishness she has succeeded 
in reab'zing the whole blessedness of wifehood far more 
than many women who have health. But we doubt 
if any century sees more than one such woman as 
she ise 

Another large class, next to that of invalids the most 
difficult to deal with, is made up of people who are by 
nature or by habit uncomfortably sensitive or irritable. 
Who has not lived at one time or other in his life in 
daily contact with people of this sort, — persons whose 
outbreaks of temper, or of wounded feeling still worse 
than temper, were as incalculable as meteoric showers ? 
The suppressed atmosphere, the chronic state of alarm 
and misgiving, in which the victims of this species of 
tyranny live are withering and exhausting to the stout- 
est hearts. They are also hardening ; perpetually hav- 
ing to wonder and watch how people will " take " things 
is apt sooner or later to result in indifference as to 
whether they take them well or ill. 

But to define all the shapes of private tyranny would 
require whole histories ; it is safe, however, to say that 
so far as any human being attempts to set up his own 
individual need or preference as law to determine the 
action of any other human being, in small matters or 
great, so far forth he is a tyrant. The limit of his 
tyranny may be narrowed by lack of power on his part, 
or of response on the part of his fellows ; but its essence 
is as purely tyrannous as if he sat on a throne with an 
executioner within call. 

Thirdly, Longevity of private tyrants. We have 



PRIVATE TYRANTS. IM 

not room under this head to do more — nor, if we had 
all room, could we do better — than to quote a short 
paragraph from George Eliot's immortal Mrs. Poyser : 
"It seems as if them as aren't wanted here are th' only 
folks as pren't wanted i' th' other world." 



l63 BITS OF TALK. 



MARGIN, 

TX7IDE-MARGINED pages please us at first sight 
^ ^ We do not stop to ask why. It has passed into 
«tn accepted rule that all e- f gant books must have broad, 
clear margins to their pages. We as much recognize 
such margins among the indications of promise in a 
book, as we do fineness of paper, clearness of type, and 
beauty of binding. All three of these last, even in 
perfection, could not make any book beautiful, or 
sightly, whose pages had been left narrow-margined 
and crowded. This is no arbitrary decree of custom, 
no chance preference of an accredited authority. It 
would be dangerous to set limit to the power of fashion 
in any thing ; and yet it seems almost safe to say that 
not even fashion itself can ever make a narrow-mar- 
gined page look other than shabby and mean. This 
inalienable right of the broad margin to our esteem is 
significant. It lies deep. The broad margin means 
something which is not measured by inches, has noth- 
ing to do with fashions of shape. It means room for 
notes, queries, added by any man's hand who reads. 
Meaning this, it means also much more than this, — ' 
fjM" more than the mere etter of " right of way." It is 



MARGIN, lb3 

a line courtesy of recognition that no one page shall 
ever say the whole of its own message ; be exhaustive, 
or ultimate, even of its own topic ; determine or enforce 
its own opinion, to the shutting out of others. No 
matter if the book live and grow old, without so much 
as an interrogation point or a line of enthusiastic ad- 
miration drawn in it by human hand, still the gracious 
import and suggestion of its broad white spaces are the 
same. Each thought invites its neighbor, stands fairly 
to right or left of its opponent, and wooes its friend. 

Thinking on this, we presently discover that margin 
means a species of freedom. No wonder the word, 
and the thing it represents, wherever we find them, 
delight us. 

We use the word constantly in senses which, speak- 
ing carelessly, we should have called secondary and 
borrowed. Now we see that its application to pages, 
or pictures, or decorations, and so forth, was the bor- 
rowed and secondary use ; and that primarily its mean- 
ing is spiritual. 

We must have margin, or be uncomfortable in every 
thing in life. Our plan for a day, for a week, for our 
lifetime, must have it, — margin for change of purpose, 
margin for interruption, margin for accident. Making 
no allowance for these, we are fettered, we are dis- 
turbed, we are thwarted. 

Is there a greater misery than to be hurried ? If we 
leave ourselves proper margin, we never need to be 
hurried. We always shall be, if we crowd our plan. 
People pant, groan, and complain as if hurry were a 



164 BITS OF TALK. 

thing outside of themselves, — an enemy, a monster, a 
disease which overtook them, and against which they 
had no shelter. It is hard to be patient with such non- 
sense. Hurry is aVmost the only known misery which 
it is impossible to have brought upon one by other 
people's fault. 

If our plan of action for an hour or a day be so fatally 
spoiled by lack of margin, what shall we say of the mis- 
take of the man who leaves himself no margin in mat- 
ters of belief? No room for a wholesome, healthy 
doubt ? No provision for an added enlightenment ? 
No calculation for the inevitable progress of human 
knowledge 1 This is, in our eyes, the crying sin and 
danger of elaborate creeds, rigid formulas of exact 
statement on difficult and hidden mysteries. 

The man who is ready to give pledge that the opinion 
he will hold to-morrow will be precisely the opinion he 
holds to-day has either thought very Httle, or to Httle 
purpose, or has resolved to quit thinking altogether. 



THE FINE ART OF SMILING. It)5 



THE FINE ART OF SMILING. 



O OME theatrical experiments are being made at this 
^ time to show that all possible emotions and all 
shades and gradations of emotion can be expressed by 
facial action, and that the method of so expressing 
them can be reduced to a system, and taught in a 
given number of lessons. It seems a matter of ques- 
tion whether one would be likely to make love or 
evince sorrow any more successfully by keeping in 
mind all the while the detailed catalogue of his flexorC 
and extensors, and contracting and relaxing No. i, ^ 
or 3, according to rule. The human memory is 
treacherous thing, and what an enormous disaster 
would result from a very slight forgetfulness in such a 
nicely adjusted system ! The fatal effect of dropping 
the superior maxillary when one intended to drop the 
inferior, or of applying nervous stimuli to the up track, 
instead of the down, can easily be conceived. Art is 
art, after all, be it ever so skilful and triumphant, and 
science is only a slow reading of hieroglyphs. Nature 
sits high and serene above both, and smiles compas 



l66 BITS OF TALK 

sionately on their efforts to imitate and understand. 
And this brings us to what we have to say about smil- 
ing. Do many people feel what a wonderful thing it is 
that each human being is born into the world with his 
own smile ? Eyes, nose, mouth, may be merely aver- 
age commonplace features ; may look, taken singly, 
very much like anybody^s else eyes, nose, or mouth. 
Let whoever doubts this try the simple but endlessly 
amusing experiment of setting half a dozen people 
behind a perforated curtain, and making them put 
their eyes at the holes. Not one eye in a hundred 
can be recognized, even by most familiar and loving 
friends. But study smiles ; observe, even in the most 
casual way, the variety one sees in a day, and it will 
soon be felt what subtle revelation they make, what 
infinite individuality they possess. 

The purely natural smile, however, is seldom seen 
in adults ; and it is on this point that we wish to dwell. 
Very early in life people find out that a smile is a 
weapon, mighty to avail in all sorts of crises. Hence, 
we see the treacherous smile of the wily ; the patron- 
izing smile of the pompous ; the obsequious smile of 
the flatterer ; the cynical smile of the satirist. Very 
few of these have heard of Delsarte ; but they outdo 
him on his own grounds. Their smile is four-fifths of 
their social stock in trade. All such smiles are hideous. 
The gloomiest, blankest look which a human face can 
wear is welcomer than a trained smile or a smile 
which, if it is not actually and consciously methodized 
by its perpetrator, has become, by long repetition, so 



THE hlNE ART OF SMILING. 167 

associated witL tricks and falsities that it partakes of 
their quality. 

What, then, is the fine art of smiling ? 

If smiles may not be used for weapons or masks, ot 
what use are they ? That is the shape one would 
think the question took in most men's minds, if we 
may judge by their behavior ! There are but two 
legitimate purposes of the smile ; but two honest 
smiles. On all little children's faces such smiles are 
seen. Woe to us that we so soon waste and lose 
them ! 

The first use of the smile is to express affectionate 
good-will ; the second, to express mirth. 

Why do we not always smile whenever we meet the 
eye of a fellow-being ? That is the true, intended rec- 
ognition which ought to pass from soul to soul con- 
stantly. Little children, in simple communities, do 
this involuntarily, unconsciously. The honest-hearted 
German peasant does it. It is like magical sunlight 
all through that simple land, the perpetual greeting 
on the right hand and on the left, between strangers, 
as they pass by each other, never without a smile. 
This, then, is " the fine art of smiling ; " like all fine 
art, true art, perfection of art, the simplest following 
of Nature. 

Now and then one sees a face which has kept its 
smile pure and undefiled. It is a woman's face usu- 
ally ; often a face which has trace of great sorrow all 
ovei it, till the smile breaks. Such a smile trans* 



l68 BITS OF TALK. 

figures ; such a smile, if the artful but knew it, is the 
greatest weapon a face can have. Sickness and age 
cannot turn its edge ; hostility and distrust cannot 
withstand its spell ; little children know it, and smile 
back ; even dumb animals come closer, and look up 
for another. 

If one were asked to sum up in one single rule what 
would most conduce to beauty in the human face, one 
might say therefore, " Never tamper with your smile ; 
never once use it for a purpose. Let it be on your 
face like the reflection of the sunlight on a lake. Af- 
fectionate good-will to all men must be the sunlight, 
and your face is the lake. But, unhke the sunhght, 
your good-will must be perpetual, and your face must 
never be overcast." 

** What ! smile perpetually ? " says the realist. " How 
silly ! " 

Yes, smile perpetually ! Go to Delsarte here, and 
learn even from the mechanician of smiles that a 
smile can be indicated by a movement of muscles so 
slight that neither instruments nor terms exist to 
measure or state it ; in fact, that the subtlest smile is 
little more than an added brightness to the eye and ^ 
tremulousness of the mouth. One second of time is 
more than long enough for it ; but eternity does not 
outlast it. 

In that wonderfully wise and tender and poetic 
book, the " Layman's Breviary," Leopold Schefei 
says, — 



THE FINE ART OF SMILING. 1 69 

A smile suffices to smile death away; 

And love defends thee e'en from wrath divine! 

Then let what may befall thee, — still smile on ! 

And however Death may rob thee, — still smile on I 

Love never has tc meet a bitter thing; 

A paradise blooms around him who smiles." 



«70 BITS OF TALK. 



DEATH-BED REPENTANCE. 

"p^OT long since, a Congregationalist clergyman, 
•^ ^ who had been for forty-one years in the minis- 
try, said in my hearing, " I have never, in all my 
experience as a pastor, known of a single instance in 
which a repentance on what was supposed to be a 
death-bed proved to be of any value whatever after the 
person recovered." 

This was strong language. I involuntarily ex- 
claimed, *' Have you known many such cases ?" 

*^ More than I dare to remember." 

"And as many more, perhaps, where the person 
died." 

" Yes, fully as many more. 

" Then did not the bitter failure of these death- 
bed repentances to bear the tests of time shake your 
contidence in their value under the tests of eter 
nity ? " 

" It did, — it does," said the clergyman, with tears 
in his eyes. The conversation made a deep impres- 
sion on my mind. It was strong evidence, from a 
quarter in which I least looked for it, of the utter 
paltriness and insufficiency of fear as a motive when 



DEATH-BED REPENTANCE. 1 71 

brought to bear upon decisions in spiritual things. 
There seem to be no words strong enough to stigma- 
tize it in all other affairs except spiritual. All ages, 
all races, hold cowardice chief among vices ; noble 
barbarians punished it with death. Even civiliza- 
tion the most cautiously legislated for, does the 
same thing when a soldier shows it " in face of the 
enemy." Language, gathering itself up and concen- 
trating its force to describe base behavior, can do no 
more than call it " cowardly." No instinct of all the 
blessed body-guard of instincts born with us seems in 
the outset a stronger one than the instinct that to be 
noble, one must be brave. Almost in the cradle the 
baby taunts or is taunted by the accusation of being 
" afraid." And the sting of the taunt lies in the prob- 
ability of its truth. For in all men, alas ! is born a 
certain selfish weakness, to which fear can address 
itself. But how strange does it appear that they who 
wish to inculcate noblest action, raise to most exalted 
spiritual conditions, should appeal to this lowest of 
motives to help them ! We believe that there are 
many " death-bed repentances " among hale, hearty 
sinners, who are approached by the same methods, 
stimulated by the same considerations, frightened by 
the same conceptions of possible future suffering, which 
so often make the chambers of dying men dark with 
terrors. Fear is fear all the same whether its dread 
be for the next hour or the next century. The closer 
the enemy, the swifter it runs. That is all the differ- 
ence. Let the enemy be surely and plainly removed, 



172 BITS OF TALK. 

and in one instance it is no more, — is as if it had 
never been. Every thought, word, or action based 
upon it has come to end. 

I was forcibly reminded of the conversation above 
quoted by some observations I once had opportu- 
nity of making at a Methodist camp-meeting. Much 
of the preaching and exhortation consisted sim- 
ply and solely of urgent, impassioned appeals to 
the people to repent, — not because repentance is 
right ; not because God is love, and it is base not 
to love and obey him ; not even because godliness 
is in itself great gain, and sinfulness is, even tempo- 
rarily, loss and ruin ; but because there is a wrath to 
come, which will inflict terrible and unending suffering 
on the sinner. He is to " flee " for his life from tor- 
ments indescribable and eternal ; he is to call on 
Jesus, not to make him holy, but to save him from 
woe, to rescue him from frightful danger ; all and 
every thing else is subordinate to the one selfish idea 
of escaping future misery. The effect of these ap- 
peals, of these harrowing pictures, on some of the 
young men and women and children was almost too 
painful to be borne. They were in an hysterical con- 
dition, — weeping from sheer nervous terror. When | 
the excitement had reached its highest pitch, an elder \ 
rose and told the story of a wicked and impenitent | 
man whom he had visited a few weeks before. The 
man had assented to all that he told him of the neces- 
sity of repentance ; but said that he was not at leisure 
that day to attend the class meeting. He resolved 



OEAZH-BED REPEJSrA^^CE. 173 

and promised, however, to do so the next week. That 
very night he was taken ill with a disease ot the 
brain, and, after three days of unconsciousness, died. 
I would not Hke to quote here the emphasis of ap- 
plication which was made of this story to the terrors 
of the weeping young people. Under its influence 
several were led, alm^ost carried by force, into the 
anxious seats. 

It was hard not to fancy the gentle Christ looking 
down upon the scene with a pain as great as that 
with which he yearned over Jerusalem. I longed 
for some instant miracle to be wrought on the spot, 
by which there should come floating down from the 
peaceful blue sky, through the sweet tree-tops, some 
of the loving and serene words of balm from his 
Gospel. 

Theologians may theorize, and good Christians 
may differ (they always will) as to the existence, ex- 
tent, and nature of future punishment ; but the fact 
remains indisputably clear that, whether there be less 
or more of it, whether it be of this sort or of that, 
fear of it is a base motive to appeal to, a false motive 
to act from, and a worthless motive to trust in. Per- 
fect love does not know it ; spin"^ual courage resents 
it ; the true Kingdom of Heaven is never taken by 
its "violence." 

Somewhere (I wish I knew where, and I wish 
I knew from whose lips) I once found this im- 
mortal sentence : " A woman went through the 
streets of -Alexandria, bearing a jar of water »id a 



i74 BITS OF TALK. 

lighted torch, and crying aloud, * With this torch 1 
will burn up Heaven, and with this water I will 
put out Hell, that God may be loved for himself 
alone,' " 



THE CORRELATION OF MORAL FORCES. I7s 



THE CORRELATION OF MORAL FORCES. 

O CIENCE has dealt and delved patiently with the 
*^ laws of matter. From Cuvier to Huxley, we have 
a long line of clear-eyed workers. The gravitating 
force between all molecules ; the law of continuity ; 
the inertial force of matter ; the sublime facts of organic 
co-ordination and adaptation, — all these are recognized, 
analyzed, recorded, taught. We have learned that the 
true meaning of the word law, as applied to Nature, is 
not decree, but formula of invariable order, immutable 
as the constitution of ultimate units of matter. Order 
is not imposed upon Nature. Order is result. Physi- 
cal science does not confuse these ; it never mistakes 
nor denies specific function, organic progression, cycli- 
cal growth. It knows that there is no such thing as 
evasion, interruption, substitution. 

When shall we have a Cuvier, a Huxley, a Tyndall 
for the immaterial world, — the realm of spiritual ex- 
istence, moral growth ? Nature is one. The things 
which we have clumsily and impertinently dared to set 
off by themselves, and label as " immaterial," are no 
less truly component parts or members of the real 



17^ BITS OF TALK, 

frame of natural existence than are molecules of oxy- 
gen or crystals of diamond. We believe in the exist- 
ence of one as much as in the existence of the other. 
In fact, if there be balance of proof in favor of either, 
it is not in favor of the existence of what we call mat- 
ter. All the known sensible qualities of matter are 
ultimately referable to immaterial forces, — "forces 
acting from points or volumes ; " and whether these 
points are occupied by positive substance, or " mat- 
ter" as it is usually conceived, cannot to-day be 
proved. Yet many men have less absolute belief in a 
soul than in nitric acid ; many men achieve lifetimes 
of triumph by the faithful use and appHcation of Na- 
ture's law — that is, formula of uniform occurrence — 
in light, sound, motion, while they all the while outrage 
and violate and hinder every one of those sweet 
forces equally hers, equally immutable, called by such 
names as truth, sobriety, chastity, courage, and good- 
will. 

The suggestions of this train of thought are too 
numerous to be followed out in the limits of a single 
article. Take, for instance, the fact of the identity of 
molecules, and look for its correlative truth in the 
spiritual universe. Shall we not thence learn charity 
and the better understand the full meaning of some 
who have said that vices were virtues in excess or 
restraint? Taking the lists of each, and faithfully 
comparing them from beginning to end, not one shall 
be found which will not confirm this seemingly para- 
doxical statement 



THE CORRELATION OF MORAL FORCES, 1 77 

Take the great fact of continuous progressive devel- 
opment which appHes to all organisms, vegetable or 
animal, and see how it is one with the law that " the 
holy shall be holy still, the wicked shall be wicked 
still." 

Dare we think what would be the formula in state- 
ment of spiritual life which would be correlative to the 
"law of continuity"? Having dared to think, then 
shall we use the expression "Httle sins," or doubt the 
terrible absoluteness of exactitude with which "every 
idle word which men speak " shall enter upon eternity 
of reckoning. 

On the other hand, looking at all existences as 
organisms, shall we be disturbed at seeming failure ? — 
long periods of apparent inactivity ? Shall we beheve, 
for instance, that Christ's great church can be really 
hindered in its appropriate cycle of progressive change 
and adaptation ? That any true membership of this 
organic body can be formed or annulled by mere human 
interference ? That the lopping or burning of branches 
of the tree, even the uprooting and burning of the 
tree itself, this year, next year, nay, for hundreds of 
years, shall have power to annihilate or even defer the 
ultimate organic result ? 

The soul of man is not outcast from this glory, this 
freedom, this safety of law. We speak as if we might 
break it, evade it; we forget it; we deny it: but it 
never forgets us, it never refuses us a morsel of our 
estate. In spite of us, it protects our growth, makes 
sure of our development In spite of us, it takes us 
12 



178 BITS OF TALK. 

whithersoever we tend, and not whithersoever we like \ 
in spite of us, it sometimes saves what we have care- 
lessly perilled, and always destroys what we wilfullj 
throw away. 



A SIMPLE BILL OF FARE, 1 79 



. A SIMPLE BILL OF FARE FOR A 
CHRISTMAS DINNER. 

A LL good recipe-books give bills of fare for dit- 
ferent occasions, bills of fare for grand dinners, 
bills of fare for little dinners ; dinners to cost so much 
per head ; dinners " which can be easily prepared with 
one servant," and so on. They give bills of fare for 
one week ; bills of fare for each day in a month, to 
avoid too great monotony in diet. There are bills of 
fare for dyspeptics ; bills of fare for consumptives ; 
bills of fare for fat people, and bills of fare for thin ; 
and bills of fare for hospitals, asylums, and prisons, as 
well as for gentlemen's houses. But among them all, 
we never saw the one which we give below. It has 
never been printed in any book ; but it has been used 
in families. We are not drawing on our imagination 
for its items. We have sat at such dinners ; v/e have 
helped prepare such dinners ; we believe in such din- 
ners ; they are within everybody's means. In fact, 
the most marvellous thing about this bill of fare is that 
the dinner does not cost a cent. Ho ! all ye that ars 
hungry and thirsty, and would like so cheap a Christ- 



l8o BITS OF TALK. 

mas dinDi*, listen to this 

BILL OF FARE FOR A CHRISTMAS DINNER. 

First Course, — Gladness. 

This must be served hot. No two housekeepers 
make it alike ; no fixed rule can be given for it. It 
depends, like so many of the best things, chiefly on 
memory ; but, strangely enough, it depends quite as 
much on proper forgetting as on proper remem- 
bering. Worries must be forgotten. Troubles must 
be forgotten. Yes, even sorrow itself must be denied 
and shut out. Perhaps this is not quite possible. 
Ah ! we all have seen Christmas days on which sor- 
row would not leave our hearts nor our houses 
But even sorrow can be compelled to look away 
from its sorrowing for a festival hour which is so 
solemcly joyous as Christ's Birthday. Memory can 
be fiiJed full of other things to be remembered. No 
soul is entirely destitute of blessings, absolutely 
without comfort. Perhaps we have but one. Very 
well ; we can think steadily of that one, if we try. 
But the probability is that we have more than we can 
count. No man has yet numbered the blessings, the 
mercies, the joys of God. We are all richer than we 
think ; and if we once set ourselves to reckoning up 
the things of which we are glad, we shall be astonished 
at their number. 

Gladness, then, is the first item, the first course on 
our bill o^ fare for a Christmas dinner. 



A SIMPLE BILL OF FARE, l8l 

Entries. — Love garnished with Smiles. 

Gentleness, with sweet- wine sauce of Laughtei. 

Gracious Speech, cooked with any fine, savory 
Herbs, such as Drollery, which is always in season, or 
Pleasant Reminiscence, which no one need be without, 
as it keeps for years, sealed or unsealed. 

Second Course. — Hospitality. 

The precise form of this also depends on individual 
preferences. We are not undertaking here to give 
exact recipes, only a bill of fare. 

In some houses Hospitality is brought on sur- 
rounded with Relatives. This is very well. In 
others, it is dished up with Dignitaries of all sorts ; 
men and women of position and estate for whom the 
host has special likings or uses. This gives a fine 
effect to the eye, but cools quickly, and is not in the 
long-run satisfying. 

In a third class, best of all, it is served in simple 
shapes, but with a great variety of Unfortunate Per- 
sons, — such as lonely people from lodging-houses, 
poor people of all grades, widows and childless in 
their affliction. This is the kind most preferred ; in 
fact, never abandoned by those who have tried it. 

For Dessert — Mirth, in glasses. 

Gratitude and Faith beaten together and piled 
up in snowy shapes. These will look light if run 
over night in the moulds of Solid Trust and Patience 



l82 BITS OF TALK. 

A dish of the bonbons Good Cheer and Kindliness 
with every-day mottoes ; Knots and Reasons in shape 
of Puzzles and Answers ; the whole ornamented with 
Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver, of the kind men- 
tioned in the Book of Proverbs. 

This is a short and simple bill of fare. There is not 
a costly thing in it ; not a thing which cannot be pro- 
cured without difficulty. 

If meat is desired, it can be added. That is another 
excellence about our bill of fare. It ha^ nothing in it 
which makes it incongruous with the richest or the 
plainest tables. It is not overcrowded by the addition 
of roast goose and plum-pudding ; it is not harmed by 
the addition of herring and potatoes. Nay, it can give 
flavor and richness to broken bits of stale bread served 
on a doorstep and eaten by beggars. 

We might say much more about this bill of fare. We 
might, perhaps, confess that it has an element of the 
supernatural ; that its origin is lost in obscurity ; that, 
although, as we said, it has never been printed before, 
it has been known in all ages ; that the martyrs feasted 
upon it ; that generations of the poor, called blessed by 
Christ, have laid out banquets by it ; that exiles and 
prisoners have lived on it ; and the despised and for- 
saken and rejected in all countries have tasted it. It 
is also true that when any great king ate well and 
throve on his dinner, it was by the same magic food. 
The young and the free and the glad, and all rich men 
in costly houses, even they have not been well fed with- 
out it 



A SIMPLE BILL OF FARE. 183 

And though we have called it a Bill of Fare lor a 
Christmas Dinner, that is only that men's eyes may 
be caught by its name, and that they, thinking it a 
specialty for festival, may learn and understand its 
secret, and henceforth, laying all their dinners accord 
ing to its magic order, may " eat unto the Lord." 



i84 



BITS OF TALK. 



CHILDREN'S PARTIES. 

" "CpROM six till half-past eleven." 

"^ " German at seven, precisely." 

These were the terms of an invitation which we saw 
last week. It was sent to forty children, between the 
ages of ten and sixteen. 

"Will you allow your children to stay at this party 
until half-past eleven ? " we said to a mother whose 
children were invited. " What can I do ?" she replied. 
" If I send the carriage for them at half-past ten, the 
chances are that they will not be allowed to come 
away. It is impossible to break up a set. And as for 
that matter, half-past ten is two hours and a half past 
their bed-time ; they might as well stay an hour longer. 
I wish nobody would ever ask my children to a party. 
I cannot keep them at home, if they are asked. Of 
course, I might ; but I have not the moral courage to 
see them so unhappy. All the other children go ; and 
what can I do ? " 

This is a tender, loving mother, whose sweet, gentle, 
natural methods with her children have made them 
sweet, gentle, natural Httle girls, whom it is a delight 
to know. But " what can she do ? " The question is 



CHILDREN'S PARTIES. 185 

by no means one which can be readily answered. It 
is very easy for ofF-hand severity, sweeping condemna- 
tion, to say, " Do ! Why, nothing is plainer. Keep 
her children away from such places. Never let them 
go to any parties which will last later than nine 
o'clock." This is the same thing as saying, " Never 
let them go to parties at all." There are no parties 
which break up at nine o'clock ; that is, there are not 
in our cities. We hope there are such parties still in 
country towns and villages, — such parties as we remem- 
ber to this day with a vividness which no social enjoy- 
ments since then have dimmed ; Saturday-afternoon 
parties, — matinies they would have been called if the 
village people had known enough ; parties which began 
at three in the afternoon and ended in the early dusk, 
while little ones could see their way home ; parties at 
which there was no " German," only the simplest of 
dancing, if any, and much more of blind-man's-buff; 
parties at which " mottoes "* in sugar horns were the 
luxurious novelty, caraway cookies the staple, and 
lemonade the only drink besides pure water. Fancy 
offering to the creature called child in cities to-day, 
lemonade and a caraway cooky and a few pink sugar 
horns and some walnuts and raisins to carry home in 
its pocket! ^One blushes at thought of the scornful 
contempt with which such simples would be received, 
— we mean rejected ! 

From the party whose invitation we have quoted 
above the little girls came home at midnight, radiant, 
Oushed, joyous, looking in their floating white muslin 



1 86 BITS OF TALK. 

dresses like fairies, their hands loaded with bouquets 
of hot-house flowers and dainty little " favors '' from 
the German. At eleven they had had for supper cham- 
pagne and chicken salad, and all the other unwhole- 
some abominations which are set out and eaten in 
American evening entertainments. 

Next morning there were no languid eyes, pale 
cheeks. Each little face was eager, bright, rosy, 
though the excited brain had had only five or six hours 
of sleep. 

" If they only would feel tired the next day, that 
would be something of an argument to bring up with 
them," said the poor mother. " But they always de- 
clare that they feel better than ever." 

And so they do. But the " better " is only a deceit- 
ful sham, kept up by excited and overwrought nerves, — 
the same thing that we see over and over and over 
again in all lives which are temporarily kindled and 
stimulated by excitement of any kind. 

This is the worst thing, this is the most fatal thing 
in all our mismanagements and perversions of the 
physical life of our children. Their beautiful elasticity 
and strength rebound instantly to an apparently unin- 
jured fulness ; and so we go on, undermining, under- 
mining at point after point, until suddenly some day 
tnere comes a tragedy, a catastrophe, for which we are 
as unprepared as if we had been working to avert, 
instead of to hasten it. Who shall say when our boys 
die at eighteen, twenty, twenty-two, our girls either in 
their girlhood or in the first strain of their woman- 



CHILDREN'S PARTIES. 1^7 

hood, — who shall say that they might not have passed 
safely through the dangers, had no vital force been 
unnecessarily wasted in their childhood, their infancy ? 

Every hour that a child sleeps is just so much in- 
vestment of physical capital for years to come. Every 
hour after dark that a child is awake is just so m»ch 
capital withdrawn. Every hour that a child lives a quiet, 
tranquil, joyous life of such sort as kittens live on 
hearths, squirrels in sunshine, is just so much invest- 
ment in strength and steadiness and growth of the 
nervous system. Every hour that a child lives a hfe of 
excited brain-working, either in a school-room or in a 
ball-room, is just so much taken away from the reserved 
force which enables nerves to triumph through the sor- 
rows, through the labors, through the diseases of later 
life. Every mouthful of wholesome food that a child 
eats, at seasonable hours, may be said to tell on every 
moment of his whole life, no matter how long it may 
be. Victor Hugo, the benevolent exile, has found out 
that to be well fed once in seven days at one meal has 
been enough to transform the apparent health of all the 
poor children in Guernsey. Who shall say that to 
take once in seven days, or even once in thirty days, 
an unwholesome supper of chicken salad and cham- 
pagne may not leave as lasting effects on the constitu- 
tion of a child ? 

If Nature would only "execute" her "sentences 
against evil works " more " speedily," evil works would 
not so thrive. The law of continuity is the hardest 
one for average men and women to comprehend, — or. 



1 88 BITS OF TALK, 

at any rate, to obey. Seed-time and harvest in gardens 
and fields they have learned to understand and profit 
by. When we learn, also, that in the precious lives of 
these little ones we cannot reap what we do not sow, 
and we must reap all which we do sow, and that the 
emptiness or the richness of the harvest is not so 
much for us as for them, one of the first among the 
many things which we shall reform will be " children's 
parties." 



AFTER-SUPPER TALK. 189 



AFTER-SUPPER TALK. 

« A FTER-DINNER talk' has been tliought ol 
•^ ^ great importance. The expression has passed 
into literature, with many records of the good sayings 
it included. Kings and ministers condescend to 
make efforts at it; poets and philosophers — greater 
than kings and ministers — do not disdain to attempt 
to shine in it. 

But nobody has yet shown what " after-supper talk " 
ought to be. We are not speaking now of the formal 
entertainment known as "a supper ; " we mean the 
every-day evening meal in the every-day home, — the 
meal known heartily and commonly as "supper," 
among people who are neither so fashionable nor so 
foolish as to take still a fourth meal at hours when 
they ought to be asleep in bed. 

This ought to be the sweetest and most precious 
hour of the day. It is too often neglected and lost in 
families. It ought to be the mother's hour ; the 
mother's opportunity to undo any mischief the day 
may have done, to forestall any mischief the morrow 
may threaten. There is an instinctive disposition in 
most famines to linger about the supper-table, quite 
unlike the eag^er haste which is seen at breakfast and 



igo BITS OF TALK. 

at dinner. Work is over for the day ; everybody is 
tired, even the little ones who have done nothing but 
play. The father is ready for slippers and a comforta- 
ble chair ; the children are ready and eager to recount 
the incidents of the day. This is the time when all 
should be cheered, rested, and also stimulated by just 
the right sort of conversation, just the right sort of 
amusement. 

The wife and mother must supply this need, must 
create this atmosphere. We do not mean that the 
father does not share the responsibility of this, as of 
every other hour. But this particular duty is one 
requiring qualities which are more essentially feminine 
than masculine. It wants a light touch and an under- 
zme to bring out tlie full harmony of the ideal home 
evening. It must not be a bore. It must not be 
empty ; it must not be too much Hke preaching ; it 
must not be wholly like play ; more than all things, 
it must not be always — no, not if it could be helped, 
not even twice — the same ! It must be that most inde- 
finable, most recognizable thing, " a good time." Bless 
the children for inventing the phrase ! It has, like all 
their phrases, an unconscious touch of sacred inspira- 
tion in it, in the selection of the good word " good," 
which lays peculiar benediction on all things to which 
it is set. 

If there were no other reason against children's hav- 
ing lessons assigned them to study at home, we should 
consider this a sufficient one, that it robs them of the 
after-supper hour with their parents. Even if their 



AFTER-SUPPER TALK. 19 1 

brains could bear without injury the sixth, seventh, or 
eighth hour, as it may be, of study, their hearts cannot 
bear the being starved. 

In the average family, this is the one only hour of 
the day when father, mother, and children can be 
together, free of cares and unhurried. Even to the 
poorest laborer's family comes now something like 
peace and rest forerunning the intermission of the 
night 

Everybody who has any artistic sense recognizes 
this instinctively when they see through the open doors 
of humble houses the father and mother and children 
gathered around their simple supper. Its mention has 
already passed into triteness in verse, so inevitably 
have poets felt the sacred charm of the hour. 

Perhaps there is something deeper than on first 
thoughts would appear in the instant sense of pleasure 
one has in this sight; also, in the universal feeling 
that the evening gathering of the family is the most 
sacred one. Perhaps there is unconscious recognition 
that dangers are near at hand when night falls, and 
that in this hour lies, or should lie, the spell to drive 
them all away. 

There is something almost terrible in the mingling 
of danger and protection, of harm and help, of good 
and bad, in that one thing, darkness. God " giveth 
his beloved sleep " in it ; and in it the devil sets his 
worst lures, by help of it gaining many a soul whiclj 
he could never get possession of in sunlight. 

Mothers, fathers ! cultivate " after-supper talk ;" play 



192 BITS OF TALK. 

" after-supper games ; " keep " after- supper books ; '* 
lake all the good newspapers and magazines you can 
afford, and read them aloud "after supper." Let 
boys and girls bring their friends home with them 
at twilight, sure of a pleasant and hospitable wel- 
come and of a good time " after supper," and parents 
may laugh to scorn all the temptations which town or 
village can set before them to draw them away from 
home for their evenings. 

These are but hasty hints, bare suggestions. But 
if they rouse one heart to a new realization of what 
evenings at home ought to be, and what evenings at 
home too often are, they have not been spoken in vain 
nor out of season. 



HYSTERIA IN LITERATURE. 193 



HYSTERIA IN LITERATURE. 

OHYSICIANS tell us that there is no known dis- 
-■- ease, no known symptom of disease, which hys- 
teria cannot and does not counterfeit. Most skilful 
surgeons are misled by its cunning into believing and 
pronouncing able-bodied young women to be victims 
of s inal disease, "stricture of the oesophagus," "gas- 
trodynia," "paraplegia," "hemiplegia," and hundreds 
of other affections, with longer or shorter names. 
Families are thrown into disorder and distress ; friends 
suffer untold pains of anxiety and sympathy ; doctors 
are summoned from far and near ; and all this while 
the vertebra, or the membrane, or the muscle, as it 
may be, which is so honestly believed to be diseased, 
and which shows every symptom of diseased action 
or inaction, is sound and strong, and as well able as 
ever it was to perform its function. 

The common symptoms of hysteria everybody is 
familiar with, — the crying and laughing in inappro- 
priate places, the fancied impossibility of breathing, 
and so forth, — which make such trouble and mortifi- 
cation for the embarrassed companions of hysterical 
persons ; and which, moreover, can be very easily sup- 
13 



194 ^ITS OF TALK, 

pressed by a little wholesome severity, accompanied 
by judicious threats or sudden use of cold water. But 
few people know or suspect the number of diseases 
and conditions, supposed to be real, serious, often in- 
curable, which are simply and solely, or in a great 
part, undetected hysteria. This very ignorance on 
the part of friends and relatives makes it almost im- 
possible for surgeons and j)hysicians to treat such 
cases properly. The probabilities are, in nine cases 
out of ten, that the indignant family will dismiss, as 
ignorant or hard-hearted, any practitioner who tells 
them the unvarnished truth, and proposes to treat the 
sufferer in accordance with it. 

In the field of literature we find a hysteria as wide- 
spread, as undetected, as unmanageable as the hysteria 
which skulks and conquers in the field of disease. 

Its commoner outbreaks everybody knows by sight 
and sound, and everybody except the miserably igno- 
rant and silly despises. Yet there are to be found cir- 
cles which thrill and weep in sympathetic unison with 
the ridiculous joys and sorrows, grotesque sentiments, 
and preposterous adventures of the heroes and hero- 
ines of the " Dime Novels " and novelettes, and the 
" Flags " and " Blades " and " Gazettes " among the 
lowest newspapers. But in well-regulated and intelli- 
gent households, this sort of writing is not tolerated, 
any more than the correlative sort of physical phe- 
nomenon would be, — the gasping, shrieking, sobbing, 
giggling kind of behavior in a man or woman. 

But there is another and more dangerous working of 



HYSTERIA IN LITERATURE, 195 

the same thing ; deep, unsuspected, clothing itself 
with symptoms of the most defiant genuineness, it 
lurks and does its business in every known field oi 
composition. Men and women are aHke prone to it, 
though its shape is somewhat afifected by sex. 

Among men it breaks out often, perhaps oftenest, in 
violent illusions on the subject of love. They asseit, 
declare, shout, sing, scream that they love, have loved, 
are loved, do and for ever will love, after methods and 
in manners which no decent love ever thought of men- 
tioning. And yet, so does their weak violence ape the 
bearing of strength, so much does their cheat look like 
truth, that scores, nay, shoals of human beings go 
about repeating and echoing their noise, and saying, 
gratefully, " Yes, this is love ; this is, indeed, what 
all true lovers must know." 

These are they who proclaim names of beloved on 
house-tops ; who strip off veils from sacred secrets 
and secret sacrednesses, and set them up naked for the 
multitude to weigh and compare. What punishment 
is for such beloved. Love himself only knows. It must 
be in store for them somewhere. Dimly one can sus- 
pect what it might be ; but it will be like all Love's 
true secrets, — secret for ever. 

These men of hysteria also take up specialties of 
art or science ; and in their behoof rant, and exagger- 
ate, and fabricate, and twist, and lie in such stentorian 
voices that reasonable people are deafened and bewil- 
dered. 

They also tell common tales in such enormous 



19^ BITS OF TALK. ' 

phrases, with such gigantic structure of rhetorical 
flourish, that the mere disproportion amounts to false- 
hood ; and, the diseased appetite in listeners growing 
more and more diseased, feeding on such diseased 
food, it is impossible to predict what it will not be 
necessary for story-mongers to invent at the end of a 
century or so more of this. 

But the worst manifestations of this disease are 
found in so-called religious writing. Theology, biog- 
raphy, especially autobiography, didactic essays, tales 
with a moral, — under every one of these titles it lifts 
up its hateful head. It takes so successfully the guise 
of genuine reHgious emotion, rehgious experience, 
religious zeal, that good people on all hands weep 
grateful tears as they read its morbid and unwhole- 
some utterances. Of these are many of the long and 
short stories setting forth in melodramatic pictures 
exceptionally good or exceptionally bad children ; or 
exceptionally pathetic and romantic careers of sweet 
and refined Magdalens ; minute and prolonged dissec- 
tions of the processes of spiritual growth ; equally 
minute and authoritative formulas for spiritual exer- 
cises of all sorts, — " manuals of drill," so to speak, 
or "field tactics" for souls. Of these sorts of books, 
the good and the bad are almost indistinguishable from 
each other, except by the carefulest attention and the 
finest insight ; overwrought, unnatural atmosphere and 
meaningless, shallow routine so nearly counterfeit the 
sound and shape of warm, true enthusiasm and wise 
precepts. 



HYSTERIA IN LITERATURE, 1 97 

Where may be the remedy for this widespread and 
widely spreading disease among writers we do not 
know. It is not easy to keep up courageous faith thai 
there is any remedy. Still, Nature abhors noise and 
haste, and shams of all sorts : quiet and patience aie 
the great secrets of her force, whether it be a moun- 
tain or a soul that she would fashion. We must be- 
lieve that sooner or later there will come a time in 
which silence shall have its dues, moderation be 
crowned king of speech, and melodramatic, spectacu- 
lar, hysterical language be considered as disreputable 
as it is silly. But the most discouraging feature of 
tlie disease is its extreme contagiousness. All physi- 
cians know what a disastrous effect one hysterical 
patient will produce upon a whole ward in a hospital. 
We remember hearing a young physician once give a 
most amusing account of a woman who was taken to 
Bellevue Hospital for a hysterical cough. Her lungs, 
bronchia, throat, were all in perfect condition ; but she 
coughed almost incessantly, especially on the approach 
of the hour for the doctor's visit to the ward. In less 
than one week half the women in the ward had similar 
coughs. A single — though it must be confessed rather 
terrific — application of cold water to the original of- 
fender worked a simultaneous cure upon her and all 
of her imitators. 

Not long ago a very parallel thing was to be observed 
in the field of story-writing. A clever, though morbid 
and melodramatic writer published a novel, whose 
heroine, having once been an inmate of a house of ill- 



igS BITS OF TALK. 

fame, escaped, and, finding shelter and Cliristian train- 
ing in the home of a benevolent woman, became a 
model of womanly delicacy, and led a life of exquisite 
and artistic refinement. As to the animus and intent 
of this story there could be no doubt ; both were good, 
but in atmosphere and execution it was essentially 
unreal, overwrought, and melodramatic. For three or 
four months after its publication there was a perfect 
outburst and overflow in newspapers and magazines 
of the lower order of stories, all more or less bad, some 
simply outrageous, and all treating, or rather pretend- 
ing to treat, the same problem which had furnished 
theme for that novel. 

Probably a close observation and collecting of the 
dreary statistics would bring to light a curious proof oj 
the extent and certainty of this sort of contagion. 

Reflecting on it, having it thrust in one's face at 
every book-counter, railway- stand, Sunday-school li- 
brary, and parlor centre-table, it is hard not to wish for 
some supernatural authority to come sweeping through 
the wards, and prescribe sharp cold-water treatment 
all around to half drown all such writers and quite 
drown all their books 1 



joir jKor. 199 



JOG TROT. 

npHERE is etymological uncertainty about the 
•*• phrase. But there is no doubt about its mean- 
ing ; no doubt that it represents a good, comfortable 
gait, at which nobody goes nowadays. 

A hundred years ago it was the fashion : in the days 
when railroads were not, nor telegraphs ; when citizens 
journeyed in stages, putting up prayers in church if 
their journey were to be so long as from Massachusetts 
into Connecticut ; when evil news travelled slowly by 
letter, and good news was carried about by men on 
horses ; when maidens spun and wove for long, quiet 
silent years at their wedding trousseaux^ and mothers 
spun and wove all which sons and husbands wore f 
when newspapers were small and infrequent, dingy- 
typed and wholesomely stupid, so that no man could 
or would learn from them more about other men's 
opinions, affairs, or occupations than it concerned his 
practical convenience to know ; when even wars were 
waged at slow pace, — armies sailing great distances 
by chance winds, or plodding on foot for thousands of 
miles, and fighting doggedly hand to hand at sight ; 
when fortunes alsc were slowly made by simple, honest 



200 BIT"^ OF TALK. 

growths, — no men excepting freebooters and pirate 
becoming rich in a day. 

It would seem treason or idiocy to sigh for these olo 
days, — treason to ideas of progress, stupid idiocy 
unaware that it is well off. Is not to-day brilliant, mar- 
vellous, beautiful ? Has not living become subject to 
a magician's "presto"? Are we not decked in the 
whole of color, feasted on all that shape and sound and 
flavor can give ? Are we not wiser each moment than 
we were the moment before ? Do not the blind see, the 
deaf hear, and the crippled dance ? Has not Nature 
surrendered to us ? Art and science, are they not our 
slaves, — coining money and running mills ? Have 
we not built and multipHed religions, till each man, 
even the most irrehgious, can have his own ? Is not 
what is called the " movement of the age '' going on at 
the highest rate of speed and of sound? Shall we 
complain that we are maddened by the racket, out of 
breath with the spinning and whirhng, and dying of the 
strain of it all ? What is a man, more or less ? What 
are one hundred and twenty millions of men, more or 
less ? What is quiet in comparison with riches ? or 
digestion and long life in comparison with knowledge ? 
When we are added up in the universal reckoning of 
races, there will be small mention of individuals. Let 
us be disinterested. Let us sacrifice ourselves, and, ] 

above all, our children, to raise the general average of « ; 

human invention and attainment to the highest possi- 
ble mark. To be sure, we are working in the dark. 
We do not know, not even if we are Huxley, do we 



JOG TROT. 20I 

know, at what point in the grand, universal scale we 
shall ultimately come in. We know, or think we know, 
about how far below us stand the gorilla and the seal. 
We patronize them kindly for learning to turn hand- 
organs or eat from porringers. Let us hope that, if 
we have brethren of higher races on other planets, 
they will be as generously appreciative of our little all 
when we have done it ; but, meanwiiile, let us never 
be deterred from our utmost endeavor by any base and 
envious misgivings that possibly we may not be the 
last and highest work of the Creator, and in a fair way 
to reach very soon the final climax of all which created 
intelligences can be or become. Let us make the best 
of dyspepsia, paralysis, insanity, and the death of our 
children. Perhaps we can do as much in forty years, 
working night and day, as we could in seventy, work- 
ing only by day ; and the five out of twelve children 
that live to grow up can perpetuate the names and the 
methods of their fathers. It is a comfort to believe, 
as we are told, that the world can never lose an iota 
that it has gained ; that progress is the great law of 
the universe. It is consoling to verify this truth by 
looking backward, and seeing how each age has 
made use of the wrecks of the preceding one as mate- 
rial for new structures on different plans. What are 
we that we should mention our preference for being 
put to some other use, more immediately remunerative 
to ourselves ! 

We must be all wrong if we are not in sympathy 
with the age in which we live. We might as well be 



202 



BITS OF TALK, 



dead as not keep up with it But which of us does not 
sometimes wish in his heart of hearts, that he had been 
born long enough ago to have been boon companion 
of his great-grandfather, and have gone respectably 
and in due season to his grave at a good jog trot ? 



THE JOYLEISS AMERICAN, 203 



THE JOYLESS AMERICAN. 

TT is easy to fancy that a European, on first reaching 
■*- these shores, might suppose that he had chanced 
to arrive upon a day when some great public calamity 
had saddened the heart of the nation. It would be 
quite safe to assume that out of the first five hundred 
faces which he sees there will not be ten wearing a 
smile, and not fifty, all told, looking as if they ever 
could smile. If this statement sounds extravagant to 
any man, let him try the experiment, for one week, of 
noting down, in his walks about town, every face he 
sees which has a radiantly cheerful expression. The 
chances are that at the end of his seven days he will 
not have entered seven faces in his note-book without 
being aware at the moment of some conscientious diffi- 
culty in permitting himself to call them positively and 
unmistakably cheerful. 

The truth is, this wretched and joyless expression 
on the American face is so common that we are hard- 
ened to seeing it, and look for nothing better. Only 
when by chance some blessed, rollicking, sunshiny boy 
or gill or man or woman flashes the beam of a laugh- 
hig countenance into the level gloom do we even 



204 BITS OF TALK. 

know that we are in the dark. Witness tlie instant 
effect of the entrance of such a person into an omnibus 
or a car. Who has not observed it ? Even the most 
stolid and apathetic soul relaxes a little. The uncon- 
scious intruder, simply by smihng, has set the blood 
moving more quickly in the veins of every human being 
who sees him. He is, for the moment, the personal 
benefactor of every one ; if he had handed about money 
or bread, it would have been a philanthropy of less 
value. 

What is to be done to prevent this acrid look of 
misery from becoming an organic characteristic of our 
people ? " Make them play more," says one philoso- 
phy. No doubt they need to '' play more ; " but, when 
one looks at the average expression of a Fourth of 
July crowd, one doubts if ever so much multiphcation 
of that kind of hohday would mend the matter. No 
doubt we work for too many days in the year, and play 
for too few ; but, after all, it is the heart and the spirit 
and the expression that we bring to our work, and not 
those that we bring to our play, by which our real 
vitality must be tested and by which our faces will be 
stamped. If we do not work healthfully, reasoningly, 
moderately, thankfully, joyously, we shall have neither 
moderation nor gratitude nor joy in our play. And 
here is the hopelessness, here is the root of the trouble, 
of the joyless American face. The worst of all demons, 
Che demon of unrest and overwork, broods in the very 
sky of this land. Blue and clear and crisp and spar- 
kling as our atmosphere is, it cannot or does not exor- 



THE JOYLESS AMERICAN^ 205 

cise the spell. Any old man can count on the fingers 
of one hand the persons he has known who led lives 
of serene, unhurried content, made for themselves 
occupations and not tasks, and died at last what might 
be called natural deaths. 

" What, then ? " says the congressional candidate from 
Meddibemps; the "new contributor" to the oceanic 
magazine ; Mrs. Potiphar, from behind her liveries ; 
and poor Dives, senior, from WaH Street ; " Are we to 
give up all ambition ? " God forbid. But, because one 
has a goal, must one be torn by poisoned spurs ? We 
see on the Corso, in the days of the Carnival, what 
speed can be made by horses under torture. Shall we 
try those methods and that pace on our journeys ? 

So long as the American is resolved to do in one day 
the v/ork of two, to make in one year the fortune of 
his whole life and his children's, to earn before he is 
forty the reputation which belongs to threescore and 
ten, so long he will go about the streets wearing his 
present abject, pitiable, overwrought, joyless look. But, 
even without a change of heart or a reform of habits, 
he might better his countenance a little, if he would. 
Even if he does not feel like smiling, he might smile, 
if he tried ; and that would be something. The muscles 
are all there ; they count the same in the American as 
in the French or the Irish face ; they relax easil} in 
youth ; the trick can be learned. And even a trick of 
it is better than none of it. Laughing masters might 
DC as well paid as dancing masters to help on society ! 
" Smiling made Easy " or the " Complete Art of Look* 



2O0 BITS OF TALK. 

ing Good-natured " would be as taking titles on book- 
sellers' shelves as " The Complete Letter-writer " or 
" Handbook of Behavior." And nobody can calculate 
what might be the moral and spiritual results if it could 
only become the fashion to pursue this branch of the 
fine arts. SurHness of heart must melt a little under 
the simple effort to smile. A man will inevitably be 
p httle less of a bear for trying to wear the face of 
a Cliristian. 

" He who laughs can commit no deadly sin," said the 
wise and sweet-hearted woman who was mother of 
Goethe. 



SPIRITUAL TEETHING 20f 



SPIRITUAL TEETHING 

"\ TILK for babes ; but, when they come to the age 
■^^■^ for meat of doctrine, teeth must be cut. It is 
harder work for souls than for bodies ; but the pro- 
cesses are wonderfully parallel, — the results too, alas ! 
If clergymen knew the symptoms of spiritual disease 
and death, as well as doctors do of disease and death 
of the flesh, and if the lists were published at end of 
each year and month and week, what a record would 
be shown ! " Mortality in Brooklyn, or New York, or 
Philadelphia for the week ending July 7th." We are 
so used to the curt heading of the little paragraph that 
our eye glances idly away from it, and we do not realize 
its sadness. By tens and by scores they have gone, — 
the men, the women, the babies ; in hundreds new 
mourners are going about the streets, week by week. 
We are as familiar with black as with scarlet, with the 
hearse as with the pleasure-carriage ; and yet " so dies 
in human hearts the thought of death " that we can be 
merry. 

But, if we knew as well the record of sick and dying 
and dead souls, our hearts would break. The air would 
be dark and stifling. We should be afraid to move, 



ZOS BUS OF TALK. 

lest we might hasten the last hour of some neighbor's 
spiritual breath. Ah, how often have we unconsciously 
spoken the one word which was poison to his fever ! 

Of the spiritual deaths, as of the physical, more than 
half take place in the period of teething. The more 
one thinks of the parallelism, the closer it looks, until 
the likeness seems as droll as dismal. Oh, the sweet, 
unquestioning infancy which takes its food from the 
nearest breast ; which knows but three things, — hun- 
ger and food and sleep ! There is only a little space 
for this delight. In our seventh month we begin to 
be wretched. We drink our milk, but we are aware 
of a constant desire to bite ; doubts which we do not 
know by name, needs for which there is no ready 
supply, make us restless. Now comes the old-school 
doctor, and thrusts in his lancet too soon. We suffer, 
we bleed ; we are supposed to be reheved. The tooth 
is said to be " through." 

Through ! Oh, yes ; through before its time. Through 
to no purpose. In a week, or a year, the wounded flesh, 
or soul, has reasserted its right, shut down on the 
tooth, making a harder surface than ever, a cicatrized 
crust, out of which it will take double time and double 
strength for the tooth to break. 

The gentle doctor gives us a rubber ring, it has a 
bad taste ; or an ivory one, it is too hard and hurts us. 
But we gnaw and gnaw, and fancy the new pain a little 
easier to bear than the old. Probably it is ; probably 
the tooth gets through a little quicker for the days and 
nights of gnawing. But what a picture of patient mis- 
ery is a baby with its rubber ring ! Really one sees 



SPIRITUAL TEETHING, 209 

sometimes in the little puckered, twisting face such 
grotesque prophecy of future conflicts, such likeness 
to the soul's processes of grappling with problems, that 
it is uncanny. 

When we come to the analysis of the diseases inci 
dent to the teething period, and the treatment of them, 
the similitude is as close. 

We have sharp, sudden inflammations ; we have 
subtle and more deadly things, which men do not de- 
tect till it is, in nine cases out of ten, too late to cure 
them, — like water on the brain ; and we have slow 
wastings away ; atrophies, which are worse than death, 
leaving life enough to prolong death indefinitely, being 
as it were living deaths. 

Who does not know poor souls in all stages of all 
these, — outbreaks of rebellion against all forms, all 
creeds, all proprieties ; secret adoptions of perilous 
delusions, fatal errors ; and slow settHng down into 
indifierentism or narrow dogmatism, the two worst liv- 
ing deaths ? 

These are they who live. Shall we say any thing 
of those of us who die between our seventh and eigh- 
teenth spiritual month ? They never put on babies 
tombstones " Died of teething." There is always a 
special name for the special symptom or set of symp- 
toms which characterized the last days. But the 
mother believes and the doctor knows that, if it had 
not been for the teeth that were coming just at that 
time, the fever or the croup would not have killed the 
chUd. 

14 



2IO BITS OF TALK. 

Now we come to the treatments ; and here again the 
parallelism is so close as to be ludicrous. The lancet 
and the rubber ring fail. We are still restless, and 
scream and cry. Then our self-sacrificing nurses walk 
with us ; they rock us, they swing us, they toss us up 
and down, they jounce us from top to bottom, till the 
wonder is that every organ in our bodies is not dis- 
placed. They beat on glass and tin and iron to distract 
our attention and drown out our noise by a bigger one ; 
they shake back and forth before our eyes all things 
that glitter and blaze ; they shout and sing songs ; the 
house and the neighborhood are searched and racked 
for something which will " amuse " the baby. Then, 
when we will no longer be " amused," and when all this 
restlessness outside and around us, added to the rest- 
lessness inside us, has driven us more than frantic, and 
the day or the night of their well-meant clamor is nearly 
over, their strength worn out, and their wits at end, 
— then comes the " soothing syrup," deadliest weapon 
of all. This we cannot resist. If there be they who 
are mighty enough to pour it down our throats, physi- 
cally or spiritually, to sleep we must go, and asleep 
we must stay so long as the effect of the dose lasts. 

It is of this we oftenest die, — not in a day or a year, 
but after many days and many years ; when in some 
sharp crisis we need for our salvation the force which 
should have been developing in our infancy, the muscle 
or the nerve which should have been steadily growing 
strong till that moment. But the force is not there ; 
the muscle is weak ; the nerve paralyzed ; and we die 



SPIRITUAL TEETHING. 21 1 

at twenty of a light fever, we fall down at twenty, under 
sudden grief or temptation, because of our long sleeps 
under soothing syrups when we were babies. 

Oh, good nurses and doctors of souls, let them cut 
their own teeth, in the natural ways. Let them scream 
if they must, but keep you still on one side ; give them 
no false helps ; let them alone so far as it is possible 
for love and sympathy to do so. Man is the only ani- 
mal that has trouble from the growing of the teeth in 
his body. It must be his own fault somehow that he 
has that ; and he has evidently been always conscious 
of a likeness between this difficulty and perversion of 
a process natural to his body, and the difficulty and 
perversion of his getting sensible and just opinions ; 
for it has passed into the immortality of a proverb that 
a shrewd man is a man who has " cut his eye-teeth ; '* 
and the four last teeth, which we get late in life, and 
which cost many people days of real illness, are called 
in all tongues, all countries, " wisdom teeth ! " 



»^a BITS OF TALK. 



GLASS HOUSES. 

TT7H0 would live in one, if he could help it? And 
^ ^ who wants to throw stones ? 

But who lives in any thing else, nowadays ? And 
how much better off are they who never threw a stone 
in their lives than the rude mob who throw them all 
the time ? 

Really, the proverb might as well be blotted out from 
our books and dropped from our speech. It has no 
longer use or meaning. 

It is becoming a serious question what shall be done, 
or rather what can be done, to secure to fastidious peo- 
ple some show and shadow of privacy in their homes. 
The silly and vulgar passion of people for knowing all 
about their neighbors' affairs, which is bad enough 
while it takes shape merely in idle gossip of mouth, is 
something terrible when it is exalted into a regular 
market demand of the community, and fed by a regular 
market supply from all who wish to print what the 
community will read. 

We do not know which is worse in this traffic, the 
buyer or the seller ; we think, on the whole, the buyer. 



GLASS HOUSES. 213 

But then he is again a seller; and so there it is, — 
wheel within wheel, cog upon cog. And, since all 
these sellers must earn their bread and butter, the 
more one searches for a fair point of attacking the evil, 
the more he is perplexed. 

The man who writes must, if he needs pay for his 
work, write what the man who prints will buy. The 
man who prints must print what the people who read 
will buy. Upon whom, then, shall we lay earnest 
hands ? Clearly, upon the last buyer, — upon him who 
reads. But things have come to such a pass already 
that to point out to the average American that it is 
vulgar and also unwholesome to devour with greedy 
delight all sorts of details about his neighbors' business 
seems as hopeless and useless as to point out to the 
currie-eater or the whiskey-drinker the bad effects of 
iire and strychnine upon mucous membranes. The 
diseased palate craves what has made it diseased, — 
craves it more, and more, and more. In case of stom- 
achs. Nature has a few simple inventions of her own 
for bringing reckless abuses to a stand-still, — dys- 
pepsia, and dehrium-tremens, and so on. 

But she takes no account, apparently, of the dis- 
eased conditions of brains incident to the long use of 
unwholesome or poisonous intellectual food. Perhaps 
she never anticipated this class of excesses. And, if 
there were to be a precisely correlative punishment, it 
is to be feared it would fall more heavily on the least 
guilty offender. It is not hard to fancy a poor soul 
who, having been condemned to do reporters' duty for 



214 BITS OF TALK. 

some years, and having been forced to dwell and dilate 
upon scenes and details which his very soul revolted 
from mentioning, — it is not hard to fancy such a soul 
visited at last by a species of delirium-tremens, in 
which the speeches of men who had spoken, the gowns 
of women who had danced, the faces, the figures, the 
furniture of celebrities, should all be mixed up in a 
grotesque phantasmagoria of torture, before which he 
should writhe as helplessly and agonizingly as the poor 
whiskey-drinker before his snakes. But it would be a 
cruel misplacement of punishment. All the while the 
true guilty would be placidly sitting down at still fur- 
ther unsavory banquets, which equally helpless pro- 
viders were driven to furnish ! 

The evil is all the harder to deal with, also, because 
it is like so many evils, — all, perhaps, — only a dis- 
eased outgrowth, from a legitimate and justifiable 
thing. It is our duty to sympathize ; it is our privi- 
lege and pleasure to admire. No man lives to himself 
alone ; no man can ; no man ought. It is right that 
we should know about our neighbors all which will 
help us to help them, to be just to them, to avoid them, 
if need be ; in short, all which we need to know for 
their or our reasonable and fair advantage. It is right; 
also, that we should know about men who are or have 
been great all which can enable us to understand their 
greatness ; to profit, to imitate, to revere ; all that will 
help us to remember whatever is worth remembering. 
There is education in this ; it is experience, it is his" 
tory. 



GLASS HOUSES. 215 

But how much of what is written, piinted, and read 
lo-day about the men and women of to-day comes 
under these heads ? It is unnecessary to do more 
than ask the question. It is still more unnecessary to 
do more than ask how many of the men and women of 
to-day, whose names have become almost as stereo- 
typed a part of public journals as the very titles of the 
journals themselves, have any claim to such promi- 
nence. But all these considerations seem insignificant 
by side of the intrinsic one of the vulgarity of the 
thing, and its impudent ignoring of the most sacred 
rights of individuals. That there are here and there 
weak fools who like to see their names and most trivial 
mxovements chronicled in newspapers cannot be de- 
nied. But they are few. And their silly pleasure is 
very small in the aggregate compared with the annoy 
ance and pain suffered by sensitive and refined people 
from these merciless invasions of their privacy. No 
precautions can forestall them, no reticence prevent ; 
nothing, apparently, short of d3dng outright, can set 
one fi*ee. And even then it is merely leaving the tor- 
ture behind, a harrowing legacy to one's friends ; for 
tombs are even less sacred than houses. Memory, 
friendship, obligation, — all are lost sight of in the 
greed of desire to make an effective sketch, a surpris- 
ing revelation, a neat analysis, or perhaps an adroit 
implication of honor to one's self by reason of an old 
association with greatness Private letters and private 
conversations, which may ouch living hearts in a thou- 
sand sore spots, are hawked about as coolly as if they 



2l6 BITS OF TALK. 

had been old clothes, left too long unredeemed in the 
hands of the pawn-broker ! " Dead men tell no tales," 
says the proverb. One wishes they could ! We should 
miss some spicy contributions to magazine and news- 
paper literature ; and a sudden silence would fall upon 
some loud-mouthed living. 

But we despair of any cure for this evil. No ridi- 
cule, no indignation seems to touch it. People must 
make the best they can of their glass houses ; and, if 
the stones come too fast, take refuge in the cellars* 



TEE OLD-CLOTHES MONGER. 217 



THE OLD-CLOTHES MONGER IN JOUR- 
NALISM. 

npHE old-clothes business has never been cons id- 
"*■ ered respectable. It is supposed to begin and 
to end with cheating ; it deals with very dirty things. 
It would be hard to mention a calHng of lower repute. 
From the men who come to your door with trays of 
abominable china vases on their heads, and are ready 
to take any sort of rags in payment for them, down — 
or up? — to the bigger wretches who advertise that 
" ladies and gentlemen can obtain the highest price for 
their cast-off clothing by calling at No. so and so, on 
such a street," they are all alike odious and despicable. 

We wonder when we find anybody who is not an 
abject Jew, engaged in the business. We think we 
can recognize the stamp of the disgusting traffic on 
their very faces. It is by no means uncommon to hear 
it said of a sorry sneak, " He looks like an old-clothes 
dealer." 

But what shall we say of the old-clothes mongers in 
journalism ? By the very name we have defined, de- 
scribed them, and pointed them out. If only we could 
make the name such a badge of disgrace that every 



2l8 BITS OF TALK, 

member of the fraternity should forthwith betake him 
or herself to some sort of honest labor ! 

These are they who crowd the columns of our daily 
nev/spapers with the dreary, monotonous, worthless, 
scandalous tales of what other men and women did, 
arc doing, or will do, said, say, or will say, wore, wear, 
or will wear, thought, think, or will think, ate, eat, or 
will eat, drank, drink, or will drink : and if there be 
any other verb coming under the head of " to do, to be, 
to suffer," add that to the Hst, and the old-clothes mon- 
ger will furnish you with something to fill out the 
phrase. 

These are they who patch out their miserable, little, 
sham "properties " for mock representations of life, by 
scraps from private letters, bits of conversation over- 
heard on piazzas, in parlors, in bedrooms, by odds and 
ends of untrustworthy statements picked up at railway- 
stations, church-doors, and offices of all sorts, by im- 
pudent inferences and suppositions, and guesses about 
other people's affairs, by garblings and partial quot- 
ings, and, if need be, by wholesale lyings. 

The trade is on the increase, — rapidly, fearfully on 
the increase. Every large city, every summer water- 
ing-place, is more or less infested with this class of 
dealers. The goods they have to furnish are more and 
more in demand. There is hardly a journal in the 
country but has column after column full of their tat- 
tered wares ; there is hardly a man or woman in the 
country but buys them. 

There is, perhaps, no remedy. Human nature has 



THE OLD-CLOTHES MONGER. 319 

not yet shed all the monkey. A lingering and grovel- 
ling baseness in the average heart delights in this sort 
of cast-ofF clothes of fellow-worms. But if the trade 
must continue, can we not insist that the profits be 
shared ? If A is to receive ten dollars for quoting B's 
remarks at a private dinner yesterday, shall not B have 
a small percentage on the sale ? Clearly, this is only 
justice. And in cases where the wares are simply 
stolen, shall there be no redress ? Here is an opening 
for a new Bureau. How well its advertisements would 
read : — 

" Ladies and gentlemen wishing to dispose of their 
old opinions, sentiments, feelings, and so forth, and 
also of the more interesting facts in their personal 
history, can obtain good prices for the same at No. — 
Tittle-tattle street. Inquire at the door marked * Regu- 
lar and Special Correspondence.' 

" N. B. — Persons willing to be reported verbatim 
will receive especial consideration." 

We commend this brief suggestion of a new business 
to all who are anxious to make a Hving and not par- 
ticular how they make it. Perhaps the class of whom 
we have been speaking would find it profitable to set 
it up as a branch of their own calling. It is quite pos- 
sible that nobody else in the country would like to 
meddle with it 



220 BITS OF TALK. 



I 



THE COUNTRY LANDLORD'S SIDE. 

TT is only one side, to be sure. But it is the side of 
•*• which we hear least. The quarrel is like all quar- 
rels, — it takes two to make it ; but as, of those two, 
one is only one, and the other is from ten to a hun- 
dred, it is easy to see which side will do most talking 
in setting forth its grievances. 

"It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer ; and 
when he is gone his way then he boasteth." We are 
oftener reminded of this text of Scripture than of any 
other when we listen to conversations in regard to 
boarders in country houses. 

*^0h, let me tell you of such a nice place we have 
found to board in the country. It is only — miles 

from Mt. or Lake ; the drives are delightful, 

and board is only %y a week." 

"Is the table a good one ? " 

" Oh, yes ; very good for the country. We had good 
butter and milk, and eggs in abundance. Meats, of 
course^ are never very good in the country. But 
everybody gained a pound a week ; and we are go- 
ing again this year, if they have not raised theif 
prices." 



THE COUNTRY LANDLORD'S SIDE. 221 

Then this model of a city woman, in search of 
country lodgings, sits down and writes to the land- 
lord :-- 

"Dear Sir, — We would like to secure our old 
rooms in your house for the whole of July and August 
As we shall remain so long a time, we hope you may 
be willing to count all the children at half-price. Last 
year, you may remember, we paid full price for the two 
eldest, the twins, who are not yet quite fourteen. I 

hope, also, that Mrs. has better arrangements 

for washing this summer, and will allow us to have our 
own servant to do the washing for the whole family. 
If these terms suit you, the price for my family — eight 
children, myself, and servant — would be $38.50 a 
week. Perhaps, if the servant takes the entire charge 
of my rooms, you would call it $37 ; as, of course, that 
would save the time of your own servants." 

Then the country landlord hesitates. He is not 
positively sure of fiUing all his rooms for the season. 
Thirty-seven dollars a week would be, he thinks, better 
than nothing. In his simplicity, he supposes that, if 

he confers, as he certainly does, a favor on Mrs. , 

by receiving her great family on such low terms, she 
will be thoroughly well disposed toward him and his 
house, and will certainly not be over-exacting in matter 
of accommodations. In an evil hour, he consents ; 
they come, and he begins to reap his reward. The 
twins are stout boys, as large as men, and much hun- 
grier. The baby is a sickly child of eighteen months, 
and requires especial diet, which must be prepared at 



222 BITS OF TALK, 

especial and inconvenient hours, in the crowded little 
kitclien. The other five children are average boys and 
girls, between the ages of three and twelve, eat cer- 
tainly as much as five grown people, and make twice 
as much trouble. The servant is a slow, inefficient, 
impudent Irish girl, who spends the greater part of 
four days in doing the family washing, and makes the 
other servants uncomfortable and cross. 

If this were all ; but this is not. Mrs. ;, who 

writes to all her friends boastingly of the cheap sum- 
mer quarters that she has found, and who gains by the 
village shop-keeper's scales a pound of flesh a week, 
habitually finds fault with the food, with the mattresses, 
with the chairs, with the rag-carpets, with every thing, 
in short, down to the dust and the flies, for neither of 
which last the poor landlord could be legitimately held 
responsible. This is not an exaggerated picture. 
Everybody who has boarded in country places in the 
summer has known dozens of such women. Every 
country landlord can produce dozens of such let- 
ters, and of letters still more exacting and unrea- 
sonable. 

The average city man or woman who goes to a 
country house to board, goes expecting what it is in 
the nature of things impossible that they should have. 
The man expects to have boots blacked and hot water 
ready, and a bell to ring for both. What experienced 
country boarder has not laughed in his sleeve to see 
such an one, newly arrived, putting his head out snap* 
pingly, like a turtle, from his doorway, and calling to 



THE COUNTRY LANDLORD'S SIDE. 223 

chance passers, "How d'ye get at anybody in this 
house?" 

If it is a woman, she expects that the tea will be of 
tlie finest flavor, and never boiled ; that steaks will be 
porter-house steaks ; that green peas will be in plenty; 
and that the American girl, who is chambermaid for 
the summer, and school-teacher in the winter, and who, 
ten to one, could put her to the blush in five minutes 
by superior knowledge on many subjects, will enter 
and leave her room and wait upon her at the table 
with the silent respectfulness of a trained city ser- 
vant. 

This is all very silly. But it happens. At the end 
of every summer hundreds of disappointed city people 
go back to their homes grumbling about country food 
and country ways. Hundreds of tired and discouraged 
wives of country landlords sit down in their houses, at 
last emptied, and vow a vow that never again will they 
take " city folks to board." But the great law of supply 
and demand is too strong for them. The city must 
come out of itself for a few weeks, and get oxygen for 
its lungs, sunlight for its eyes, and rest for its over- 
ivorked brain. The country must open its arms, 
whether it will or not, and share its blessings. And 
so the summers and the summerings go on, and there 
ire always to be heard in the land the voices of mur- 
muring boarders, and of landlords deprecating, vindi- 
cating. We confess that our sympathies are with the 
landlords. The average country landlord is an honest, 
well-meaning man, whose idea of the profit to be made 



224 BITS OF TALK, 

" oif boarders " is so moderate and simple that the 
keepers of city boarding-houses would laugh it and 
him to scorn. If this were not so, would he be found 
undertaking to lodge and feed people for one dollar or 
a dollar and a half a day ? Neither does he dream of 
asking them, even at this low price, to fare as he fares. 
The " Excelsior " mattresses, at which they cry out in 
disgust, are beds of down in comparison with the straw 
^Hick" on which he and his wife sleep soundly and 
contentedly. He has paid $4.50 for each mattress, as 
a special concession to what he understands city prej- 
udice to require. The cheap painted chamber-sets 
are holiday adorning by the side of the cherry and pine 
in the bedrooms of his family. He buys fresh meat 
every day for dinner ; and nobody can understand the 
importance of this fact who is not familiar with the 
habit of salt-pork and codfish in our rural districts. 
That the meat is tough, pale, stringy is not his fault ; 
no other is to be bought. Stetson himself, if he dealt 
with this country butcher, could do no better. Vege- 
tables ? Yes, he has planted them. If we look out 
of our windows, we can see them on their winding 
way. They will be ripe by and by. He never tasted 
peas in his life before the Fourth of July, or cucumbers 
before the middle of August. He hears that there are 
such things ; but he thinks they must be " dreadful 
unhealthy, them things forced out of season," — and, 
whether healthy or not, he can't get them. We couldn't 
ourselves, if we were keeping house in the same town- 
ship To be sure, we might send to the cities for 



THE COUNIRY LANDLORD'S SIDE. 225 

them, and be served with such as were wilted to begin 
with, and would arrive utterly unfit to be eaten at end 
of their day's journey, costing double their market 
price in the added express charge. We should not 
do any such thing. We should do just as he does, 
make the best of " plum sauce," or even dried apples. 
We should not make our sauce with molasses, proba- 
bly ; but he does not know that sugar is better ; he 
honestly likes molasses best. As for saleratus in the 
bread, as for fried meat, and fried doughnuts, and ubi- 
quitous pickles, — all those things have he, and his 
fathers before him, eaten, and, he thinks, thriven on 
from time immemorial. He will listen incredulously 
to all we say about the effects of alkalies, the change 
of fats to injurious oils by frying, the indigestibility of 
pickles, &c. ; for, after all, the unanswerable fact re- 
mains on his side, though he may be too polite or too 
slow to make use of it in the argument, that, having 
fed on these poisons all his life, he can easily thrash 
us to-day, and his wife and daughters can and do work 
from morning till night, while ours must lie down and 
rest by noon. In spite of all this, he will do what he 
can to humor our whims. Never yet have we seen the 
country boarding-house where kindly and persistent 
remonstrance would not introduce the gridiron and 
banish the frying-pan, and obtain at least an attempt 
at yeast-bread. Good, patient, long-suifering country 
people 1 The only wonder to us is that they tolerate 
so pleasantly, make such effort to gratify, the prefer- 
ences and prejudices of city men and women, who 

15 



226 BITS OF TALK, 

come and who remain strangers among them ; and who^ 
'n so many instances, behave from first to last as if they 
were of a different race, and knew nothing of any com* 
men bonds of humanity and Christianity. 



I 



TRE GOOD STAFF OF PLEASURE. 327 



THE GOOD STAFF OF PLEASURE. 

TN an inn in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, where I dined 
■*■ every day for three weeks, one summer, I made 
the acquaintance of a little maid called Gretchen. She 
stood all day long washing dishes, in a dark passage- 
way which communicated in some mysterious fashion 
with cellar, kitchen, dining-room, and main hall of the 
inn. From one or other of these quarters Gretchen 
was sharply called so often that it was a puzzle to know 
how she contrived to wash so much as a cup or a plate 
in the course of the day. Poor child ! I am afraid she 
did most of her work after dark ; for I sometimes left 
her standing there at ten o'clock at night. She was 
blanched and shrunken from fatigue and lack of sun- 
light. I doubt if ever, unless perhaps on some excep- 
tional Sunday, she knew the sensation of a full breath 
of pure air or a warm sunbeam on her face. 

But whenever I passed her she smiled, and there 
was never-failing good-cheer in her voice when she 
said " Good-morning." Her uniform atmosphere of 
contentedness so impressed and surprised me that, at 
last, I said to Franz, the head waiter, — 

" What makes Gretchen so happy ? She has a hard 



«28 BITS OF TALK. 

life, always standing in that narrow dark place, wash- 
ing dishes.*' 

Franz was phlegmatic, and spoke very little English. 
He shrugged his shoulders, in sign of assent that 
Gretchen's life was a hard one, and added, — 

"Ja, ja. She likes because all must come at her 
door. There will be no one which will say not noth- 
mg if they go by." 

That was it. Almost every hour some human voice 
said pleasantly to her, " Good-morning, Gretchen," or 
"It is a fine day ; " or, if no word were spoken, there 
would be a friendly nod and smile. For nowhere in 
kind-hearted, simple Germany do human beings pass 
by other human beings, as we do in America, without 
so much as a turn of the head to show recognition of 
humanity in common. 

This one little pleasure kept Gretchen not only alive, 
but comparatively glad. Her body suffered for want 
of sun and air. There was no helping that, by any 
amount of spiritual compensation, so long as she must 
stand, year in and year out, in a close, dark corner, 
and do hard drudgery. But, if she had stood in that 
close, dark corner, doing that hard drudgery, and had 
had no pleasure to comfort her, she would have been 
dead in three months. 

If all men and women could realize the power, the 
might of even a small pleasure, how much happier the 
world would be ! and how much longer bodies and 
souls both would bear up under livmg ! Sensitive 
people realize it to the very core of their being. They 



THE GOOD STAFF OF PLEASURE. 229 

know that often and often it happens to them to be re- 
vived, kindled, strengthened, to a degree which they 
could not describe, and which they hardly comprehend, 
by some little thing, — some word of praise, some token 
of remembrance, some proof of affection or recogni- 
tion. They know, too, that strength goes out of them, 
just as inexplicably, just as fatally, when for a space, 
perhaps even a short space, all these are wanting. 

People who are not sensitive also come to find this 
out, if they are tender. They are by no means insep- 
arable, — tenderness and sensitiveness ; if they were, 
human nature would be both more comfortable and 
more agreeable. But tender people alone can be just 
to sensitive ones ; living in close relations with them, 
they learn what they need, and, so far as they can, 
supply it, even when they wonder a little, and perhaps 
grow a little weary. 

We see a tender and just mother sometimes sighing 
because one over-sensitive child must be so much more 
gently restrained or admonished than the rest. But 
she has her reward for every effort to adjust her 
methods to the instrument she does not quite under- 
stand. If she doubts this, she has only to look on 
the right hand and the left, and see the effect of care- 
less, brutal dealing with finely strung, sensitive na- 
tures. 

We see, also, many men, — good, generous, kindly, 
but not sensitive-souled, — who have learned that the 
sunshine of their homes all depends on little things, 
which it would never have entered into their busy and 



s>2fl BITS OF TALK. 

composed hearts to think of doing, or saying, or pro- 
viding, if they had not discovered that without them 
their wives droop, and with them they keep well. 

People who are neither tender nor sensitive can 
neither comprehend nor meet these needs. Alas ! that 
there are so many such people ; or that, if there must 
be just so many, as I suppose there must, they are not 
distinguishable at first sight, by some mark of color, or 
shape, or sound, so that one might avoid them, or at 
least know what to expect in entering into relation with 
them. Woe be to any sensitive soul whose life must, 
in spite of itself, take tone and tint from daily and in- 
timate intercourse with such ! No bravery, no philos* 
ophy, no patience can save it from a slow death. But, 
while the subtlest and most stimulating pleasures which 
the soul knows come to it through its affections, and 
are, therefore, so to speak, at every man's mercy, there 
is still left a world of possibility of enjoyment, to which 
we can help ourselves, and which no man can hinder. 

And just here it is, I think, that many persons, 
especially those who are hard-worked, and those who 
have some special trouble to bear, make great mistake. 
They might, perhaps, say at hasty first sight that it 
would be selfish to aim at providing themselves with 
pleasures. Not at all. Not one whit more thar* it is 
for them to buy a bottle of Ayer's Sarsaparilla (if they 
do not know better) to " cleanse their blood " in the 
spring ! Probably a dollar's worth of almost any thing 
out of any other shop than a druggist's would "cleanse 
their blood '' better, — a geranium, for instance, or 3 



THE GOOD STAFF OF Pl,EASURE. 23 1 

photograph, or a concert, or a book, or even fried 
oysters, — any thing, no matter what, so it is innocent, 
which gives them a little pleasure, breaks in on the 
monotony of their work or their trouble, and makes 
them have for one half-hour a "good time." Those 
who have near and dear ones to remember these things 
for them need no such words as I am writing here. 
Heaven forgive them if, being thus blessed, they do 
not thank God daily and take courage. 

But lonely people, and people whose kin are not kind 
or wise in these things, must learn to minister even in 
such ways to themselves. It is not selfish. It is not 
foolish. It is wise. It is generous. Each contented 
look on a human face is reflected in every other human 
face which sees it ; each growth in a human soul is a 
blessing to every other human soul which comes in 
contact with it. 

Here will come in, for many people, the bitter re- 
strictions of poverty. There are so many men and 
women to whom it would seem simply a taunt to ad- 
vise them to spend, now and then, a dollar for a pleas- 
ure. That the poor must go cold and hungry has 
never seemed to me the hardest feature in their lot ; 
there are worse deprivations than that of food or 
raiment, and this very thing is one of them. This is 
a point for charitable people to remember, even more 
than they do. 

We appreciate this when we give some plum-pud- 
ding and turkey at Christmas, instead of all coal and 
flannel. But, any day in the year, a picture on the 



/ 



^32 BITS OF TALK, 

wall might perhaps be as comforting as a blanket on 
the bed ; and, at any rate, would be good for twelve 
months, while the blanket would help but six. I have 
seen an Irish mother, in a mud hovel, turn red with 
delight at a rattle for her baby, when I am quite sure 
she would have been indifferently grateful for a pair of 
socks. 

Food and physicians and money are and always will 
be on the earth. But a " merry heart" is a " continual 
feast," and " doeth good like a medicine ; " and " lov- 
ing favor " is " chosen," " rather than gold and silver. 



WANTED.^ A HOME. 233 



WANTED.— A HOME. 

"VrOTHING can be meaner than that "Miseij 
■*-^ should love company." But the proverb is 
founded on an original principle in human nature* 
which it is no use to deny and hard work to conquer. 
I have been uneasily conscious of this sneaking sin 
in my own soul, as I have read article after article in 
the English newspapers and magazines on the ** deca- 
dence of the home spirit in English family life, as seen 
in the large towns and the metropolis." It seems that 
tlie English are as badly off as we. There, also, men 
are wide-awake and gay at clubs and races, and sleepy 
, and morose in their own houses ; "sons lead lives in- 
dependent of their fathers and apart from their sisters 
and mothers ; " " girls run about as they please, with- 
out care or guidance." This state of things is "a 
spreading social evil," and men are at their wifs end 
to know what is to be done about it. They are ran- 
sacking " national character and customs, religion, and 
the particular tendency of the present literary and sci- 
entific thought, and the teaching and preaching of the 
public press," to find out the root of the trouble. One 
writer ascribes it to the " exceeding restlessness and 
the desire to be doing something which are predomi- 
nant and indomitable in the Anglo-Saxon race ; " an- 



334 BITS OF TALK. 

other to the passion which almost all families have for 
seeming richer and more fashionable than their means 
will allow. In these, and in most of their other theories, 
they are only working round and round, as doctors so 
often do, in the dreary circle of symptomatic results, 
without so much as touching or perhaps suspecting 
their real centre. How many people are blistered for 
spinal disease, or blanketed for rheumatism, when the 
real trouble is a little fiery spot of inflammation in 
the lining of the stomach ! and all these difficulties in 
the outworks are merely the creaking of the machinery, 
because the central engine does not work properly. 
Blisters and blankets may go on for seventy years 
coddHng the poor victim ; but he will stay ill to the 
last if his stomach be not set right. 

There is a close likeness between the doctor's high- 
sounding list of remote symptoms, which he is treating 
as primary diseases, and the hue and outcry about the 
decadence of the home spirit, the prevalence of ex- 
cessive and improper amusements, club-houses, bil- 
liard-rooms, theatres, and so forth, which are "the 
banes of homes." 

The trouble is in the homes. Homes are stupid, 
homes are dreary, homes are insufferable. If one can 
be pardoned for the Irishism of such a saying, homes 
are their own worst "banes." If homes were what 
they should be, nothing under heaven could be invented 
which could be bane to them, which would do more 
than serve as useful foil to set off their better cheer, 
their pleas anter ways, theii wholes omer joys 



I 



WANTED. -- A HOME 235 

Whose fault is it that they are not so? Fault is a 
heavy word. It includes generations in its pitiless 
entail. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof is but 
one side of the truth. No day is sufficient unto the 
evil thereof is the other. Each day has to bear bur- 
dens passed down from so many other days ; each per- 
son has to bear burdens so complicated, so interwoven 
with the burdens of others ; each person's fault is so 
fevered and swollen by faults of others, that there is no 
disentangling the question of responsibility, Every 
thing is everybody's fault is the simplest and fairest 
way of putting it. It is everybody's fault that the 
average home is stupid, dreary, insufferable, — a place 
from which fathers fly to clubs, boys and girls to streets. 
But when we ask who can do most to remedy this, — 
in whose hands it most lies to fight the fight against 
the tendencies to monotony, stupidity, and instabihty 
which are inherent in human nature, — then the answer 
is clear and loud. It is the work of women ; this is 
the true mission of women, their "right" divine and 
unquestionable, and including most emphatically the 
" right to labor." 

To create and sustain the atmosphere of a home, — 
it is easily said in a very few words ; but how many 
women have done it ? How many women can say to 
themselves or others that this is their aim ? To keep 
house well women often say they desire. But keeping 
house well is another affair, — I had almost said it has 
nothing to do with creating a home. That is not true, 
of course ; comfortable living, as regards food and fire 



236 BITS OF TALK. 

and clothes^' can do much to help on a home. Never- 
theless, with one exception, the best homes I have 
ever seen were in houses which were not especially 
well kept ; and the very worst I have ever known were 
presided (I mean tyrannized) over by "perfect house- 
keepers." 

All creators are single-aimed. Never will the painter, 
sculptor, writer lose sight of his art. Even in the in- 
tervals of rest and diversion which are necessary to 
his health and growth, every thing he sees ministers to 
his passion. Consciously or unconsciously, he makes 
each shape, color, incident his own ; sooner or later it 
will enter into his work. 

So it must be with the woman who will create a 
home. There is an evil fashion of speech which says 
it is a narrowing and narrow life that a woman leads 
who cares only, works only for her husband and chil- 
dren ; that a higher, more imperative thing is that she 
herself be developed to her utmost. Even so clear and 
strong a writer as Frances Cobbe, in her otherwise 
admirable essay on the " Final Cause of Woman," falls 
into this shallowness of words, and speaks of women 
who live solely for their famihes as "adjectives." 

In the family relation so many women are noth- 
ing more, so many women become even less, that 
human conception may perhaps be forgiven for losing 
sight of the truth, the ideal. Yet in women it is hard 
to forgive it. Thinking clearly, she should see that a 
creator can never be an adjective ; and that a woman 
who creates and sustains a home, and under whose 



WANTED.^ A HOME. 237 

hands children grow up to be strong and pure men and 
women, is a creator, second only to God. 

Before she can do this, she must have development ; 
in and by the doing of this comes constant develop- 
ment ; the higher her development, the more perfect 
her work ; the instant her own development is arrested, 
her creative power stops. All science, all art, all 
rehgion, ail experience of life, all knowledge of men — 
will help her ; the stars in their courses can be won to 
fight for her. Could she attain the utmost of knowl- 
edge, could she have all possible human genius, it 
would be none too much. Reverence holds its breath 
and goes softly, perceiving what it is in this woman's 
power to do ; with what divine patience, steadfastness, 
and inspiration she must work. 

Into the home she will create, monotony, stupidity, 
antagonisms cannot come. Her foresight will provide 
occupations and amusements ; her loving and alert 
diplomacy will fend off disputes. Unconsciously, 
every member of her family will be as clay in her 
hands. More anxiously than any statesman will she 
meditate on the wisdom of each measure, the bearing 
of each word. The least possible governing which is 
compatible with order will be her first principle ; her 
second, the greatest possible influence which is com- 
patible with the growth of individuality. Will the 
woman whose brain and heart are working these prob- 
lems, as applied to a household, be an adjective ? be 
idle ? 

6he will be no more an adjective than the sun is an 



338 BITS OF TALK, 

adjective in the solar system ; no more idle than Na- 
ture is idle. She will be perplexed ; she will be weary ; 
she will be disheartened, sometimes. All creators, save 
One, have known these pains and grown strong by 
them. But she will never withdraw her hand for one 
instant. Delays and failures will only set her to cast- 
ing about for new instrumentalities. She will press all 
things into her service. She will master sciences, that 
her boys' evenings need not be dull. She will be worldly 
wise, and render to Caesar his dues, that her husband 
and daughters may have her by their side in all their 
pleasures. She will invent, she will surprise, she 
will forestall, she will remember, she will laugh, she will 
listen, she will be young, she will be old, and she will 
be three times loving, loving, loving. 

This is too hard ? There is the house to be kept ? 
And there are poverty and sickness, and there is not 
time? 

Yes, it is hard. And there is the house to be kept ; 
and there are poverty and sickness ; but, God be 
praised, there is time. A minute is time. In one 
minute may live the essence of all. I have seen a 
beggar-woman make half an hour of home on a door- 
step, with a basket of broken meat ! And the most 
perfect home I ever saw was in a little house into the 
sweet incense of whose fires went no costly things. A 
thousand dollars served for a year's living of father, 
mother, and three children. But the mother was a 
creator of a home ; her relation with her children was 
tlie most beautiful I have ever seen ; «ven a dull and 



WANTED.-- A HOME, 239 

commonplace man was lifted up and enabled to do good 
work for souls, by the atmosphere which this woman 
created ; every inmate of her house involuntarily 
looked into her face for the key-note of the day ; and 
it always rang clear. From the rose-bud or clover-leaf 
which, in spite of her hard housework, she always 
found time to put by our plates at breakfast, down to 
the essay or story she had on hand to be read or dis- 
cussed in the evening, there was no intermission of 
her influence. She has always been and always will 
be my ideal of a mother, wife, home-maker. If to her 
quick brain, loving heart, and exquisite tact had been 
added the appliances of wealth and the enlargements 
of a wider culture, hers would have been absolutely 
the ideal home. As it was, it was the best I have ever 
seen. It is more than twenty years since I crossed its 
threshold. I do not know whether she is living or not 
But, as I see house after house in which fathers and 
mothers and children are dragging out their lives in a 
hap-hazard alternation of listless routine and unpleas- 
ant collision, I always think with a sigh of that poor 
little cottage by the seashore, and of the woman who 
was "the light thereof;" and I find in the faces of 
many men and children, as plainly written and as sad 
to see as in the newspaper columns of " Personals,' 
" Wanted, — a home." 



BITS OF TRAVEL. 

By H. H. 

Square i8mo. Cloth, red edges. Price $1.25. 

*" Some one has said that, if vTie could open the mail-bags, and read the 
.women's letters, they would be mv>re entertaining than any books. This vol- 
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The faded wonders of Europe turn out to be wholly fresh, when seen through 
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reader of the * Atlantic. * It comprises so much — such humor, such pathos, 
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y The volume has few of the characteristics of an ordinary book of travel. 
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of their characters, form an exception to the rule that narratives of travel are 
interesting in proportion to the reader's previous knowledge of the subject. 
In several instances, they leave the beaten track of the tourist ; but they 
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are here offered so tempting a foretaste." — New York Tribune. 

" Travel increaseth a man. But, next to going bodily, is to wander, through 
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pictures of life in Germany, Italy, and Venice. Every one is in itself a gem. 
Brilliant, chatty, full of fine feminine taste and feeling, — just the letters one 
waits impatiently to get, and reads till the paper has been fingered through. 
It has been often observed that women are the best correspondents. We can- 
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Bits of Travel at Home 

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♦ 

.ii.fr XI 1 „ TT„T.f i*«: tno well and favorably known to need introduction to 
•*Mrs. Helen Hunt IS too w^n a ^ ^j ^^^^ thoughtful, vigorous, ar4 

American .readers. Her Pff^"|f^^^'^„„^;iuced. She is a poet to the manner born, 
truly imagmative ^Jj^^^^^P^^^^^^^^ enters into^er prose writings. Her 

and something ot the poetic ioui,ii a h j rViarmine accounts o£ paces ar.d 
•Bits of Travel/.pubhshed years ago, gave charmmg^accout j ^.^^ _^^^ 

scenes and experiences . in Europe Her ^^u^"^ 1"'%, ^^^ ,^6 sweetness, 
useful suggestions put in ex<=.eed'nf\y ':^,,f °^^ H„ 

and bloom of life's morn;ng ™'h the msjg^it and p ac ,ca^. y ^^^^^^ y^^ . ^^.^^ 

other books have each widened her he ar^repuat,o^^^^^. ^^ ^^^ ^ 
of Travel at Home is n her ^est vein. describes and paints, and 

is chiefly devoted to CaWorma and Colorado, bhe bo ^^^^^^^ ^^ ^^^^^^ 
she intersperses her ^ketches of nature w,mc ^i'there. All through tha 

the frontier and in *e new communit es sprin ing up up Hke flowers 

closely printed book are delicate httle bus of descipt^o^^^ P^ ^^^ ^ 

m a meadow, which the f^f/^^ ^^ ° ^^'^^'Tor umr^er reading^ an/w.H make 
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many a dull day brighter by ''^Xs'ef he voS' as follows? 'O emperor, wilt 

^o"l^:STplreni^at/nr=^^^ 

"vfrr;vrrvv-\r^^^^^^^^^ 

:sii »-ti'^h^e";::;pp55v^^»^^^^^^^^^ 

1° jo^^blS^tfrTwargt^^^^^^^^^ recommended to this." - C... 

heart of a woman. , . t ;.„„u , ^,„c'.v of color. Her picturesque diction 

" H. H.'s choice of words is of ''^elf a stuoy ot coK,r v ^^^^ f,^^.,^ 

rivals the skill of the painter, aP^ pre^f"^=„ ^'f^cX be surpassed by the briglu- 

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RAMON A: A Story. 

By HELEN JACKSON (H. H.). 

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* Uncle Tom's Cabin,' and its exquisite fiuish of style is beyond that 
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*• The best novel written by a woman sir^ce George Eliot died, as 
it seems to me, is Mrs. Jackson's ' Ramona-' What action is there ! 
What motion ! How entrainant it is ! It carries us along as i£ 
mounted on a swift horse's back, from beginning to end, and it Js 
only when we return for a second reading that v.e can appreciate 
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portrayed George Eliot's * Dorothea.* " -^T. W. Higginson, 
Unsolicited tribute of a stranger, a lady in Wisconsin : -— 
*' I beg leave to thank you with an mtense heartiness for your 
piiblic espousal c-f the cause of the Indian. In your * Century of 
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* Ramona 'you have dealt most tenderly with the Indians as men 
and women. You have shown that their stoicism is not indiffer- 
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have shown the tender grandeur of their love, the endurance of 
their constancy. While, by * Ramona,' you have made your name 
immortal, you have done something which is far greater You are 
but one; they are many. You have helped those who cannot help 
themselves. As a novel, *Ram.ona' must stand beside 'Romola,* 
both as regards literary excellence and the portrayal of life's deepest, 
most vital, most solemn interests. I think nothing in literature 
bince G^ Msmith's ' Vicar of Wakefield ' equals your description of 
the flight of Ramona and Alessandro. Such delicate pathos and 
tender joy, such pure conception of life's realities, and such loftiness 
of self-abnegating love ! How much richer and happier the world 
i& with • Ramona ' in it I " 

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NEW YEAR, AND EASTER. 

l6mo. Cloth. Price $1.25. 



" It is dlfScult not to say too much, containing as it does the most 
beautiful thoughts that men and women have ever expressed on three of 
the most memorable days of the j^ear, Christmas, the New Year, and 
Easter." — Christian Union. 

"All the old favorites will be found in the collection, and a great 
many other verses v^'hich, though not so commonly read, are not less 
enjoyable than those more familiar. The charming little anthology 
seems to cover its particular field thoroughly and most satisfactorily." — 
Saturday Evening Gazette. 

**This is a very graceful little volume of well-selected poems from all 
sources suitable to the seasons of Christmas, New Year, and Easter. 
The selections are made with unusual taste and discrimination ; and there 
probably exists no volume so happily adapted to the purposes for which 
it was compiled. The whole field of English poetry has been culled 
from to gather these graceful bouquets of spring and winter flowers. 
The selections range from Shakespeare down even to the magazine 
writers of the day." — New York Graphic. 

**This little book will serve an excellent purpose. The want hag 
often been felt of a collection of the poems which cluster around these 
festival days. We have often been impressed with the difficulty of put- 
ting the hand upon such poems, even when, as this book shows, there is 
a large amount of such material extant. A large number of anonymous 
poems, many of them of undoubted aiid some of traditional merit, have 
found a place in the volume, interleaved with poems by eminent writers, 
which have become classical." — Christian Register. 



Sold by all booksellers. Mailed^ post-paid^ on 
receipt of price., by the publishers^ 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, 

Boston. 



DAILY STRENGTH FOR 
DAILY NEEDS. 

Selected by the Editor of *' Quiet HouRSe" 

i6mo. Cloth, Price ^i.oo ; white cloth, gilt, ^1.25. 
$ 

'*■ This little book is made up of selections from Scripture, and verses 
of poetry, and prose selections for each day of the year. We turn with 
confidence to any selections of this kind which Mrs. Tileston may make. 
In her ' Quiet Hours,' ' Sunshine for the Soul,' * The Blessed Life,' and 
other works, she has brought togeth-jr a large amount of rich devotional 
material in a poetic form. Her present book does not disappoint us. 
We hail with satisfaction every contribution to devotional literature 
which shall be acceptable to liberal Christians. This selection is mada 
up from a wide range of auttiors, and there is an equally wide range of 
topics. It is an excellent book for private devotion or for use at the 
family altar." — Chfistia7i Register. 

" It is made up of brief selections in prose and verse, with accompa- 
nying texts of Scripture, for every day in the year, arranged by the editor 
of ' Quiet Hours,' and .or the purpose of ' bringing the reader to perform 
Ae duties and to bear the burdens of each day with cheerfulness and 
courage.' It is hardly necessary to say that the selection is admirably 
made, and that the names one finds scattered through the volume suggest 
the truest spiritual insight and aspiration. It is a book to have always 
on one's table, and to make one's daily companion." — Christian Union. 

"They are the words of those wise and holy men, who, in all ages 
have realized the full beauty of spiritual experience. They are words to 
comfort, to encourage, to strengthen, and to uplift into faith and aspira- 
tion. It is pleasant to think of the high and extended moral development 
that were possible, if such a book were generally the daily companion and 
counsellor of thinking men and women Every day of the year has its 
appropriate text and appropriate thoughts, all helping towards the best 
life of the reader. Such a volume needs iio appeal to gain attention to 
It.'* — Sunday Globe, Boston. 



Sold by all booksellers. Mailed., post-paid^ on 
receipt of price ^ by the Publishers^ 
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, Boston. 



QUIET HOURS. 

A COLLECTION OF POEMS, MEDITATIVE 
AND RELIGIOUS, 

FIRST AND SECOND SERIES. 

*' Such a book as this seems to us much better adapted than any formal book 
of devotion to beget a calm and prayerful spirit in the reader. It will no doubt 
become a dear companion to many earnestly religious people." — Christian 
Register. 

** Thousands of thoughtful and devout minds have been helped, comforted, and 
strength en'^d by the little volume of poetical selections, published under the title 
of * Quiet Hours,' some years since ; and these and many more will welcome a nev« 
volume, published under the same title, constructed on the same plan, and 
breathing the same earnest and gentle spirit. This second series of ' Quiet 
Hours,' like the first, bears the imprint of Roberts Bros. It is contained in a 
dainty little volume of the Little Classic style, prettily printed and bound ; and 
there are not far from two hundred pieces in it, grouped under the heads, 
'Nature,' 'Morning and Evening,' 'Inward Strife,' 'Life and Duty,* 
'Prayer and Aspiration,' 'Trust and Adoration,' 'Heaven and the Saints,* 
and ' Miscellaneous.* The poems are chosen with exquisite taste ; their range 
is broad, and their tone is clear and true." -^ Boston Journal. 

"'Quiet Hours' is the appropriate title which some unnamed compiler has 
given to a collection of musings of many writers, — a nosegay made up of some 
slighter, choicer, and more delicate flowers from the garden of the poets. Emer- 
son, Chadwick, Higginson, Arnold, Whittier, and Clough are represented, as 
well as Coleridge, Browning, Wordsworth, and Tennyson ; and the selections 
widely vary in character, ranging from such as relate to the moods and aspects o', 
nature, to voices of the soul when most deeply stirred." — Congregationalist. 



i8mo, cloth, red edges. Price, $i.oo each. Two vols, in one 
Price, $1.50; calf or seal, $4.00. Sold by all booksellers Mailed 
poet-paid, by the Publishers, 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, Boston. 



HOW TO DO IT. 

By EDWARD EVERETT HALE. 

CONTENTS. 

How to Talk ; How to Write ; How to Read ; How to gtl 
mto Society ; How to Travel ; Life at School and in Vacation; 
life Alone ; Habits with Children ; Life with your Elders | 
Habits of Reading , Getting Ready. 

i6mo. Price $i.oo. 

" The little work is intended especially for the benefit of young readers, 
but it is equally adapted to give pleasure to the older members of the family 
«drcle. It is weighty in thought, of acute observation, versatile in its illus- 
trations and examples, affectionate in tone, and racy in expression." — 
N. K Tribune, 

" This is a very sensible little book. * How to Do It * means * how you 
are to behave in society,* * how you are to read,* * how you are to Hve witii 
your elders,* and * how with children,* &c. On all these points Mr. Hale 
gives very shrewd, kindly advice. The first chapter, with its description 
and reminiscences of Boston as it was, will charm every reader, and tempt 
him to go further, when indeed he can scarcely fail to get much good.'* — 
London Spectator, 

** It is a mistake to suppose this charming, amusing, and useful little 
book is only for young people. It is equally needed by multitudes ol 
people who have less knowledge than years ; parents who do n» t know 
* how to do it * any better than their sons and daughters ; men and women, 
well informed in current matters of interest, but who do not know how to 
read, or write, or talk, or travel, or go into society, or even behave at church, 
m a proper manner. Let them get this book, and Mr. Hale, in his quaint, 
humorous, attractive, and sensible way, will tell them exactly how to do all 
these tilings, and more. His pages are crowded with good sense and prac- 
tical wisdom, and bright with anecdote and story, with pleasant talk and 
words of cheer, which not only show how to do it, but are sure to teach 
courage to the timid, and modesty to the self-suflficient, in doing it" — 
Universalist Quarterly, 

— • 

Sold by all Books ellefs. Mailed^ postpaid^ by the Ptih* 
LTITLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, Boston. 



SUNSHINE IN THE SOUL 



POEMS SELECTED BY THE EDITOR 
OF ''QUIET hours:' 



• Another delicate little morceau of a book. Seemly in its oirLer garb, bat 
Incomparably more beautiful within. A cunningly selected group, by the hand oi 
A skilful arranger of poems, from the choicest vmters. An exquisite and precious 
Kttle book, that will doubtless let God's sunshine into many a sad soul." — Chris- 
tian Intelligencer, 

*' * Sunshine in the Soul * is a collection, in a bijou volume, of a number of 
the most beautiful, tender, uplifting, and satisfying verses of a religious charactei 
which exist in our language. There is abundance of help and comfort in this little 
<rolume, and many a heart will be made glad in its possession." — Boston 
Traveller. 

** Designed, as its title indicates, to cheer and elevate, and to be a bright conr 
panion for the reader. It is pleasant to find such a book of religious verse, 
that has nothing austere or gloomy in its pages, nothing that seems to darkco 
heaves to man." — Portland Press, 



First and Second Series, i8mo, cloth. Price, 50 cents each. Both 
series in one volume, price 75 cents. Sold by all Booksellers. 
Mailed, postpaid, by the Publishers, 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, 

Boston, 



VERSES. 

By H. H. 

A New Enlarged Edition, Squa?'e iSmo. Uniform with 
<* Bits of Talk " and " Bits of Travels Price $i .00. 



** The volume is one which will make H. H. dear to all the lovers of true 
poetry. Its companionship will be a delight, its nobility of thought and of purpose 
an inspiration. . - . This new edition comprises not only the former little book 
with the same modest title, but as many more new poems. . . . The best critics 
have already assigned to H. H. her high place in our catalogue of authors. She 
is, without doubt, the most highly intellectual of our female poets. . . . The new 
poems, while not inferior to the others in point of literary art, have in them more 
of fervor and of feeling \ more of that lyric sweetness which catches the attention 
and makes the song sing itseif over and over afterwards in the remembering brain 
. . . Some of the new poems seem among the noblest H. H. has ever written. 
They touch the high-water mark of her intellectual power, and are full, besides, ol 
passionate and tender feeling. Among these is the ' Funeral March.' " — N. Y. 
Tribune. 

"A delightful book is the elegant little volume of 'Verses,' by H. H.,— 
instinct with the quality of the finest Christian womanhood. . . . Some wives and 
mothers, growing sedate with losses and cares, will read many of these * Verses' 
with a feeling of admiration that is full of tenderness." —Advance. 

" The poems of this lady have taken a place in public estimation perhaps 
higher than that of any living American poetess. . . . They are the thoughts of 
a delicate and refined sensibility, which views life through the pure, still atmos- 
phere of religious fervor, and unites all thought by the tender talisman of love." — 
Inter- Ocean. 

" Since the days of poor * L. E. L.,' no woman has sailed into fame under a 
flag inscribed with her initials only, until the days of * H. H.' Here, however, 
the parallelism ceases ; for the fresh, strong beauty which pervades these * Verses 
nas nothing in common with the rather languid sweetness of the earlier writer. 
Unless I am much mistaken, this enlarged volume, double the size of that origi- 
nally issued, will place its author not merely above all American poetesses and all 
living English poetesses, but above all women who have ever written poetry in 
the English language, except Mrs. Browning alone. ' H. H.' has not yet proved 
herself equal to Mrs. Bro\yning in range of imagination ; but in strength and depth 
the American writer is quite the equal of the English, and in compactness an<J 
Symmetry altogether her superior." — T. W. H. in TJte Index. 



Sold by all booksellers. Mailed^ post-paid^ by the Pub* 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, 

Boston. 



THE WORKS OF 

Edward Everett Hale 

New Library Edition 

In Ten Volumes^ J2mo^ Cloth, extra* Per volume, $L50 



The New Library Edition of Dr. Hale's Works is issued under 
the supervision of the author, including revision and new matter. 
Among the books to be embraced in the set are the following : 

Vol. I. The Man Without a Country, and Other Stories 

The Man Without a Country. Did He Take the Prince to Ride ? 

My Double, and How He Undid Me. The Children of the Public. 

The Rag-Man and The Rag-Woman. The Skeleton in the Closet 

His Level Best. The Modern Psyche. 

Round the W^orld in a Hack. The Happy Island. 

Vol. II. In His Name, and Christmas Stories 

In His Name. They Saw a Great Light. 

Christmas Waits in Boston. Hands Off. 

Daily Bread. Cromwell's Statue. 

Vol. III. Ten Times One, and Other Stories 

Ten Times One is Ten. Hepzibah's Turkeys. 

Neither Scrip nor Money. Our New Crusade. 

Stand and W^ait. 

Vol. IV. The Brick Moon, and Other Stories 

The Brick Moon. 99 Newbury Street. 

Crusoe in New^ York. The Survivor's Story. 

The Lost Palace. Thanksgiving at the Polls. 

Ideals. One Cent. 

Bread on the W^aters. 

Vols. VI. =X. will include 

Mr. Tangier's Vacations. Essays on Social Subjects. 

Philip Nolan's Friends. A New England Boyhood. 

Sybaris, and How They Lived in History and Antiquities of 

Hampton. Boston. 

How to Live, Sermons, etc. Etc., etc. 



LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, Publishers 
254 Washington Street, Boston, Mass. 



OTHER EDITIONS OF 

Dr. MALE'S Writings 



Mr. Hale never writes without he has something worth writing, and the 
reader is always sure of getting something from even the briefest of his books 
worth remembering. — Transcript. 

THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY. With an 
Introduction giving an account of the circumstances and inci- 
dents of its publication, and a Preface by the author, written 
in the year of the War with Spain. i6mo. Cloth. 50 cents. 

Illustrated Edition. With fifty pictures by Frank 

T. Merrill. 8vo. Cloth, extra. 75 cents. 

The rarest and most influential piece of fiction in American literature. — 
Philadelphia Press. 

Well on its way toward the rank of a classic. — New York Tribune. 

The Story of the Man without a Country will be remembered and read as 
long as the American flag flies, and it will continue to do good to successive gen- 
erations of young Americans. . . . What a splendid work of imagination and 
patriotism that story is ! Its theme is vital, and consequently its influence is 
perennial. — New York Sun {^Editorial). 

IN HIS NAME. A Story of the Waldenses, Seven Hun- 
dred Years Ago. Square iSmo. $1.00. 
Paper covers, 25 cents. 

Holiday Edition. One hundred and twenty-nine 

Illustrations by G. P. Jacomb-Hood. i2mo. $1.25. 

Nothing that Mr. Hale has written is so ingenious in conception and exqui- 
site in execution as his much-admired story entitled *'In His Name." — Provi- 
dence Journal. 

A touching, almost a thrilling, tale is this by E. E. Hale, in its pathetic 
simplicity and its deep meaning. It is a story of the Waldenses in the days 
when Richard Coeur de Lion and his splendid following wended their way to the 
Crusades, and when the name of Christ inspired men who dwelt in palaces, and 
men who sheltered themselves in the forests of France. " In His Name " was the 
"Open Sesame " to the hearts of such as these, and it is to illustrate the power 
of this almost magical phrase that the story is written. That it is charmingly 
written, follows from its authorship. — New York Commercial Advertiser. 

TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN: The Possible Reforma- 

tion. A new edition, in two parts. Part I. The Story. Part 

II. Harry Wadsworth and Wadsworth Clubs. i6mo. $1.00. 

Paper covers, 25 cents. 

The four rules are over my writing-desk and in my heart. Every school boy 
and girl of age to understand it should have this story. — Extract from a letter 
by an unknown correspondent. 



MRS. MERRIAM'S SCHOLARS. A Story of the 

Original Ten. i6mo. Ji.oo. 

In " Mrs. Merriam's Scholars," Mr. Hale takes up some of the "dropped 
stitches " of the previous volume [Ten Times One is Ten] and proceeds to weave 
therefrom a new and delightful story. — The Advatice {Chicago). 

FOUR AND FIVE. A Story. i6mo. $i.oo. 

Dr. Edward E. Hale's '* Four and Five " belongs to the "Ten Times One 
Series," and is another example of that wise man's ability to blend the noblest 
moral lessons with the most animated fiction. — New York Tribune. 

MR. TANGIER'S VACATIONS. A Novel. i6mo. 

^1.25. 

Paper, 50 cents. 

The book has a purpose, — to induce people to help each other, to work 
together, in order to make life better. . . . The love stories in the book are delight- 
ful. — Worcester Spy. 

PHILIP NOLAN'S FRIENDS. Illustrated. i2mo. 

$1.50. 

SIBYL KNOX; or, Home Again. A Story of To-Day. 

i2ino. $1.00. 

THE NEW OHIO. A Story of East and West. i2mo. 

$1.00. 

GONE TO TEXAS ; or, The Wonderland Adven- 
tures of a Pullman. i6mo. $1.00. 

This airy summer book just suited for all excursionists. — The Watchman. 

UPS AND DOWNS* An Every-Day Novel. i6mo. $1.50. 
A good, a very good, American novel. — Philadelphia Press. 

A NEW ENGLAND BOYHOOD. New edition. 

Illustrated. i6mo. Cloth, ^i.oo. 

As a matter of social and historical importance this little work will one day 
be as valuable as Pepys' Diary. — Boston Transcript. 

WHAT CAREER? or, The Choice of a Vocation 

and the Use of Time; i6mo. ^1.25. 

"What Career?" is a book which will do anybody good to read. — 

Watchviayt, 

OUR NEW CRUSADE. i6mo. ^i.oo. 

The gist of the book is to show how possible it is for the best spirits of a 
community, through wise organization, to form themselves into a lever by means 
of which the whole tone of the social status may be elevated. — SoutJiern 
Churchman. 

HOW TO DO IT. i6mo. $1.00. 

We do not see hov/ either sex can fail, after reading his pages, to know How 
to Talk, Mow to Write, How to Read, How to go into Societ\', and How to 
Travel. These, with Life at School, Life in Vacation, Life Alone, Habits in 
Church, Life with Children, Life with your Elders, Habits of Reading, and Get- 
ting Ready, are the several topics of ihe more than as many chapters, and make 
the volume one which should find its wa~y to the hands of every boy and girl. — 
Congregatio7ialiit. 



I 



FRANKLIN IN FRANCE. From Original Documents, 

most of which are now published for the first time. With 

engraved portraits, etc. 2 vols. 8vo. $6.00. 

The story of his winning for his country a place among the nations of the 
earth deserves to be equally familiar to every American citizen. — New York 
Evening Post. 

SEVEN SPANISH CITIES, and the Way to 
them. i6mo. $1.25. 

Mr. Hale makes Spain more attractive and more amusing than any other 
traveller has done, and he lavishes upon her epigram and wit. — Boston 
A dvertiser. 

FOR FIFTY YEARS. Verses written on occasion, in the 
course of the nineteenth century. i6mo. Gilt. $1.00. 

JUNE TO MAY. Sermons. T6mo. ^1.25. 

SUNDAY-SCHOOL STORIES on the Golden 
Texts of the International Lessons of 1889. 

3 vols. i6mo. Each, $1.00. 

HELPFUL WORDS. Selected by Mary B. Merrill. 

Illustrated by Frank T. Merrill. Square i6mo. $1.00. 

Every page of the prose is a beautiful poem, rich in thought and pure in 
sentiment, and encouraging to the best in the human soul. — hiter-Ocean. 

THE NEW HARRY AND LUCY. By Edward E. 

Hale and Lucretia P. Hale. With Illustrations by 

Herbert D. Hale. i6mo. $1.25. 

It will give young readers who have never visited Boston a good idea cf its 
notable features; and the familiar way in which the information is conveyed, in 
the form of letters, is one of the chief charms of the story. 

EDITED BY DR. HALE. 

Stories of "War. Told by Soldiers. i6mo. ^i.oo. 
Stories of the Sea. Told by Sailors. i6mo. $1.00. 
Stories of Adventure. Told by Adventurers. i6mo. $1.00. 
Stories of Discovery. Told by Discoverers. i6mo. $1.00. 
Stories of Invention. Told by Inventors. i6mo. ^i.oo. 



LITTLE, BROWN, & CO., Publishers 

254 Washington Street, Boston, Mass. 



Mar- so 1901 



•^/f^-; ■ 



«EgS- f/iAR 2- 19Q1 



i-i 



